The Crys-T Series
by Charlie Chaplin 2
Summary: A collection of snapshot-fics about the Senshi and Shitennou adjusting and living life in Crystal Tokyo. These fics are in no particular order. Some are light, some are angst-heavy. Senshi x Shitennou, Neo Queen Serenity x Neo King Endymion. May find strong language, crude humour and sexual situations in some (warnings will be given). See Introduction chapter for more details.
1. Introductory Information

**Introduction:**

The following fics are snap-shot fics of the Senshi and Shitennou as they try and adjust to life in Crystal Tokyo.

They can be read together, or can be treated as stand-alone. It's totally up to you. Some of these fics will be angst-heavy, some will be light. They are, also, in no particular order.

All of my fics involve Senshi x Shitennou relationships (I can't help it, I am obsessed).

Each time I update, I will post the fic title and description here with any warnings. Thank you and enjoy! Constructive criticism is always welcome!

An Evening:

_Summary: _The Nephrite and Jadeite - two friends - spend a rare evening together discussing life and love in Crystal Tokyo.

_Characters: _Nephrite; Jadeite (with references to various Senshi and Shitennou).

_Warnings: _Crude language and sexual references.

_Notes:_ Originally written for the Shitennou Forums Ficathon (2011) and heavily edited.

Trauma

_Summary: _Why Minako crashed the Rolls Royce Phantom in "An Evening".

_Characters: _Minako; Kunzite (with brief appearances of various Senshi and Shitennou); three brief appearances of OCs.

_Warnings: _Angst-heavy.

American Honey:

_Summary: _Makoto and Nephrite spend their last hours of existence together. (This fic has been nicknamed 'Apocalyptic Fluff' because it is the fluffiest thing I have written in an extremely long while...)

_Characters_: Makoto; Nephrite (with references to various Senshi and Shitennou).

_Warnings: _Character deaths, but in a... nice way?

_Notes: _Originally written for the Shitennou Forum Ficathon (2012).


	2. An Evening

Nephrite - Napoleon ('Leo') Graham-Asquith  
Jadeite - Jacinto ('Jace') Skallen  
Kunzite - Cairo Roth  
Zoisite - Daniel ('Danny' / 'Zeph') Zephyr  
Neo Queen Serenity ('Nitty')  
King Endymion ('Dimi')

* * *

"How should we like it were stars to burn  
With a passion for us we could not return?  
If equal affection cannot be,  
Let the more loving one be me."  
_ The More Loving One, W.H. Auden_

"Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance."  
_ Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen_

* * *

Work Text:

Napoleon walked in and, as expected, he found his friend sitting at his desk, but with his gaze fixed on the horizon instead of the screen in front of him. "Why so melancholy?"

Jacinto looked away from the view through his window, a lazy smile on his features at the intrusion. "A man can't enjoy the approach of dusk in his own city without being accused of being sad?"

Napoleon wouldn't be fooled, but it was far too early in the conversation to directly address the real reason - and, in his opinion, a ridiculously, overly-romantic one - as to why Jacinto tended to find the time of twilight and dusk so lugubrious. "Not on his own he can't." He sat himself on the couch against the crystalline wall. "Sunsets make people feel wistful, unless you're with a woman. In that case you're too busy to notice the skyline because you're either otherwise occupied or you're busy planning how to get yourselves there."

Jacinto looked at his friend with scepticism. "Those are really the only two options? If I'm watching the sun go down on my own I'm depressed-"

"I said melancholic," Napoleon interrupted, grinning. "I think it's important to note here that you're the one who brought up depression."

"Fine," Jacinto said, correcting himself for the sake of argument. "If I'm watching the sunset on my own it's because I'm sad about something, but if I'm watching it with someone else it's because I want to have sex with them?"

Napoleon shrugged. "Common sense if you think about it. It's the end of a day, the sun is dying for the night, the colours are romantic. It's normally a thing you do in couples, right? People can't help feeling wistful if they don't have someone to share it with."

"Do you even think about the things that come out of your mouth before you say them?"

"Of course I do."

"I don't know if that makes it better or worse." He looked down at his screen and switched it off, deciding that his work was done for the rest of the day. "So if you're here with me, waiting for the sun to go down, what does that say about our relationship?"

"I don't know. What do you think it says?" Napoleon looked down at his own crotch. "Do you want this?" he asked, pointing at it.

Jacinto's face darkened unexpectedly. "As tempting as the offer is, you're married man," he said with biting sarcasm, "and from experience I can tell you that such scandalous behaviour within the Royal Guard is apparently on par with... what was it? Ah yes, bloody fucking murder. Your words, if I recall correctly."

Napoleon was unable to respond to the comment, taken completely by surprise. While it had happened a decade ago, to the very day, that event had never been mentioned at all by Jacinto, let alone discussed openly.

"Sorry," Jacinto offered when he noticed the expression on the other man's face. "I couldn't help it. I've had a few things on my mind, lately."

"So I was right, then?"

"About what?"

"My theory about sunsets. You are upset, and judging by the uh… mood you're in, the comment you just made and by the fact that the colour of the sky at this particular time of day matches her eyes almost perfectly-"

"Don't," Jacinto warned.

"-I have a feeling it has less to do with what happened ten years ago, and more to do with its catalyst-"

"I'm sorry I even brought it up," Jacinto tried in a vain attempt to get Napoleon to stop. But the broader man would not be deterred, especially considering he'd just had his own (completely justifiable) words thrown in his face.

"-a certain Senshi of Fire, maybe? One whose childish vow of celibacy has prevented you from regularly achieving pure carnal satisfaction with her for the past, what? Forty seven years? Well, five hundred and forty seven if you really want to get technical, and that's not including the time you knew her before the Freeze."

Jacinto shook his head in disgust, resenting Napoleon's brashness. "Fuck you."

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Napoleon said, not taking Jacinto's venom to heart, "because you certainly aren't getting any from her."

Jacinto sighed with a sense of heavy resignation. Once Napoleon was given an inch, he'd bash through the proverbial door with absolutely no filter in place. There was no use becoming upset at what he said, he'd only use it as fuel. He looked out of the window instead.

After a moment Napoleon threw his hands into the air. "Well, _that_ was pathetic."

The blond turned his head again. "What do you mean?"

"I came here for banter. I was expecting some kind of witty repartee and all I get is a floppy sigh?"

"I did not sigh." Jacinto could not help the small smile which appeared on his face. "I was trying to stop myself from yawning. You're boring."

"Right now you're the one who's fucking boring."

"I'm not a trained seal, I don't entertain on cue."

"Only boring people say that sort of thing. Ones who are out-bantered by their amazing friends."

"You're pulling at straws there," Jacinto got up from his chair and moved around to the front of the desk, where he leaned against it, "and we're not eighteen any more. Insults and flirtatious bullshit aren't going to make me forget my problems."

Napoleon scoffed, offering no sympathy whatsoever. "What problems do you have? You're Overseer of the Interior. Nothing fucking happens in Crys-T, it's practically Utopia. I'm the one who drew the short straw."

"You do realise people stopped using the word 'fuck' about as soon as they woke up from the Freeze, right?"

"I'm old school, and you still use 'fuck' too."

Jacinto briefly gave it some thought. "I suppose I do. You know what they say nowadays?"

Napoleon rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I've heard a few of them. None of them carry the same weight, though. Back in our day, we really knew how to curse."

Jacinto smirked. "Do you realise how old you just sounded?"

"We are old." Napoleon shrugged. "Just because we don't look it, doesn't mean that we aren't. We're the dinosaur exhibition at the museum…except we're still breathing."

"That's bleak, Leo. I wasn't depressed before, but now thanks to your helpful input, I just might get there."

"It certainly hasn't diminished your predilection for sarcasm."

"It's the most charming part of my personality."

"Well, at least you aren't sitting in a corner moping over the twilight because it's the _same colour as her eyes_ any more, you sad fuck. Now you've got a legitimate fear to brood over."

Jacinto shook his head and laughed. "If this is your way of trying to cheer me up, you're doing a shit job."

Napoleon grinned. "I don't know what you were expecting from me, I only came down to let you know that Serenity had to cancel the dinner with all of us tonight."

"I saw the message."

"And you didn't respond to it? You never miss a chance to make Nitty feel guilty for having to fulfil her queenly duties."

"As I am sure you were able to deduce, I wasn't in the right frame of mind to reply."

"Well, snap out of it because I need you to help me get her to remorse-gift us free stuff. There's an antique leather sofa couch in the exhibit hall I want moved to my personal quarters."

"I'm sure whatever Danny said was good enough. He's never one to hold back."

"Yeah, right," Napoleon said, dismissing the dig at their fellow Shitennou. "You know Zeph has always had a soft spot for Her Majesty. He's an angel around her. And if I'm the only one who's mercilessly teasing her, then I'm just an arsehole trying to bully the most compassionate and benevolent sovereign to have ever lived. It's not funny if you're not doing it, too."

"You could just ask her for the couch."

"Where's the fun in that?" He looked at Jacinto discreetly, watching him for his reaction. "Besides, you know she loves it. And she's sensitive about these things. You don't want her to worry."

With that Jacinto made the connection, the hidden reason for the surprising and rare visit suddenly becoming plainly obvious. _The ever dutiful Nephrite,_ he thought. "Cairo or Dimi?" he asked, referring to the two people who would have sent Napoleon to come and check up on him when he didn't respond to the group message. He guessed it was the former, since Dimi wouldn't have attempted to manipulate him into answering the Queen in order to put her at ease. His motivations would have been more altruistic than that.

"Neither," Napoleon admitted. "I came myself."

Jacinto shook his head. "It's just a message, you're overreacting. The Queen isn't going to be sitting there fretting about me not sending her a witty reply to 'Sorry, sorry, sorry guys we have to reschedule tonight's dinner '."

"Who ever said your replies were witty?"

"Our Lord and Master did, on numerous occasions. And I have it on record in a message from Nitty, too, if you want to see that."

Napoleon scoffed. "What does she know?"

"She's the reason you came to see me, isn't she?"

Napoleon shook his head in denial. "She didn't ask me to, but she does have a lot on her plate."

"Well, Leo, Nitty _is_ queen of the entire planet. It's not exactly a surprise that she's busy."

"She'd still expect a reply from you."

"She's a big girl. And it's nearly the agreed meeting time anyway, she knows I'll have figured it out soon enough, or that someone will have told me," he said, gesturing to Napoleon and proving himself correct.

"That's not the point. It might be a good idea to acknowledge that you received it, to show that her that you're alright. You're never one not to answer a message, not unless there's something wrong."

"You're making me sound needy."

"Not needy, sociable."

Jacinto staggered and made a show of being shocked. "Was that- did you just pay me a compliment?"

"Just message her."

Jacinto waved the suggestion away. "Leave it, there's really no need. You're thinking about it too much."

Napoleon huffed, persevering despite Jacinto's reluctant attitude. "The last thing she needs is to feel the strain of our issues. She'll know what today means for you and then when she talks to Dimi about it, he'll get all-"

"Fine." Jacinto leaned backwards against the front of his oak desk and pulled up his screen again behind him, giving in and taking the easy way out of the conversation. "I'll send her a damn message."

"Good. But make it funny. And tell her I want the couch, she'll listen to you."

"No, do it yourself." He glared at him for being forced into doing something he didn't feel like doing. "Asshole."

Napoleon snorted involuntarily. "Sunsets. They bring out the worst in people."

"It's a stupid, unfounded theory." Jacinto began to type quickly on the holographic keyboard. "And for the record," he said, mid-message, "your other analogy didn't make any sense, either."

"The live dinosaur exhibition one?" Napoleon looked at Jacinto for a moment, as if he saw through his comment. "Yes it did. You know what I meant."

_We're obsolete…_ Jacinto thought to himself, but he didn't like it. "We're not dinosaurs yet." He pressed 'send'. "There. Happy now?"

"Did you mention the couch?"

"No."

"Then what the hell did I come here for?"

Jacinto made a face like it was an obvious answer. "For my supply of alcohol and scintillating conversation."

"Just the first one," Napoleon grinned as he scratched the thick stubble along his jawline.

"Scotch, rum, port or beer?" Jacinto asked, making his way to a small cupboard in the corner of the room.

"Whisky, please." He frowned when he noticed that the large bottle Jacinto pulled out was only a third full. "You're running low. I can order another one for you, but it'll take a good few weeks, even for me. I'd give you one of mine, but I was just forced to hand over my last spare."

Jacinto nodded. "Thanks, that would be appreciated. For this evening, though, I suppose we can polish this one off." He held up two crystal glasses in his large hand. "Who took your booze?"

Just the thought of what he had lost irritated Napoleon. "Some disgusting foreign fucking diplomat who probably wouldn't be able to tell a bottle of piss from a glass of whisky, let alone a sublime twenty three year old single malt from Osaka." His face quickly turned to one of disgust at the memory of the people he had been forced to interact with the day before. "I don't want to talk about it. They're all the same, anyway. Brainless, greedy, idiot shits."

The corner of Jacinto's mouth lifted in a closed-lipped smile, a combination of disapproval and amusement. "For a man who has the most delicate job in the world, your lack of enthusiasm and political correctness is not exactly reassuring."

"They're cowards, the lot of them. They don't want our help, but they're jealous of us all the same. I can't stand these people."

Jacinto's smile turned to a chuckle at his friend's frustration. "I'm surprised that no-one's gone to war with us yet with you and your winning personality in charge," he said as he poured them both glasses of the amber beverage.

"Don't joke." Apparently, Napoleon was surprised too. "Although having an all-powerful, magic super-couple as our state leaders certainly gives them pause for thought." He was practically sneering. "We're better than them, and they know it. It's not my fault they can't handle that truth. And until they figure out how to live with us without resentment, then nothing I say will ever make an iota of difference to them. So what the hell is the point?" He took the proffered glass. "Thanks. The sooner we take over this planet, the happier I'll be."

Jacinto sipped the drink, savouring the fire it spread across his tongue. "That's not going to happen any time soon if you keep making us sound like dictators," he paused, a thought occurring to him. "Although I suppose technically we are dictators."

Napoleon tutted. "I obviously don't use the actual phrase 'take over this planet' when I'm negotiating."

"But you do tell 'didgeridoo-fucking' Australian trade ministers to go 'ride a kangaroo into their croc-infested rivers and get eaten slowly' because they disagreed with a few provisions in the draft energy trade agreement?"

Napoleon grimaced. "You heard about that?"

"Who didn't? It was not your finest hour. It even beats what you said to the Finnish last year."

"Yeah well, it wasn't just a few provisions, they were refusing to sanction the general quota reduction of the temporary power allocation we've allotted them during cases of emergency in other member states," he explained, as if it excused his behaviour. "Crys-T is fucking struggling to power East Asia by itself until it can be assimilated fully, and now we've got to send temporary power to Australasia too? And they won't agree to a reduction in power during the minute likelihood of a disaster somewhere else?" He shook his head, riled at just the memory of the last international trade session. He gulped down a large sip of his drink for good measure.

Jacinto tried to play devil's advocate for the sake of rationality. "They have a right to be scared. They're switching from fossil fuels, which have powered the world for a long time, to something which is still relatively new and terrifying, I might add, given the past experience the world has had with Crystal-Energy."

Napoleon shook his head, disagreeing. "The Freeze was a completely different set of events."

"The Freeze involved magic and the annihilation of everything they ever knew. Crystals, and the energy we now harvest from them, were the cause of it all. Not everyone is comfortable with that."

"Do you know how many people oil killed? Not even quickly, either, but slowly, sucking away the life and health of everything."

"It wasn't eighty percent of the total world population, and it certainly didn't all happen at once. People don't remember the horrors they live with when there's something unknown to be more afraid of."

Napoleon looked at him skeptically. "You think this is about them being afraid of change? That's just being naïve."

"Enlighten me, then."

"It's the complete opposite. They want to be bumped up the List of Conversion. They want change faster than anybody."

Jacinto's bright blue eyes crinkled with thought. "They're right behind the South American countries, aren't they? That means they're in the upper twenties?"

"Seventeenth now," Napoleon corrected. "Which means we'll be ready to start converting the continent fully to Crystal-Energy in about a quarter of a century. That's even before Sudan and the other countries on the African East-Coast."

Jacinto frowned. "Sudan is a lower priority for full crystal assimilation than Australia is? Wasn't it a developing country before the Freeze? I thought we prioritised through necessity, the poorer first?"

"We're officially scrapping that idea, that's what the meeting was about last week. It's more viable to do it by geographical location."

"Shit," Jacinto blinked and then took another sip of his drink. "That's a big change of plan."

"Tell me about it. Dimi's the one who's brewing that storm, but it makes sense… ask Danny to explain it to you. Or don't. It's a long, complicated and uninteresting tale of crystal growth patterns, fibre-optics and frequency waves."

"So Australia isn't satisfied with being higher up than in the original plan?"

"Yeah, which is ridiculous. Last time I checked, they didn't have starving Congolese children or Nigerian oil-shortage wars," he threw his hand up like he was tossing something away, "but they don't fucking care, they're trying to sabotage the energy trade agreement so that we can't give them a temporary source of power at all. If we leave them the way they are, they think we're going to have to fully assimilate them sooner or they'll run out of fossil fuel completely. They were being greedy and stubborn and I lost my temper." He sighed. "Remember when Australia was the cool country? With all the cricket and shrimp barbecues and cork hats and sexually attractive women?"

Jacinto ignored the urge to remind Napoleon that use of the word 'cool' had not actually been cool since the early nineteen nineties, and nodded instead.

"I used to have the patience for this kind of thing."

"No you didn't." Jacinto laughed. "I still think Cairo was on drugs when he was delegating roles."

"You're telling me. How the hell he thought I would suit this job, I'll never know. I think he chose it to spite me. Bastard." Napoleon shook his head with disbelief. "Me, watching over dealings with fucking foreigners."

"You definitely do the last part well enough." It was a deliberate barb against Napoleon for having brought up Rei at the beginning of the night. "Perks of the job?" Jacinto gave his friend a wry smile. "I hear tell that Argentinian ambassador's assistant was exceptionally pleased when she left last week."

"What?"

Jacinto swirled the liquid in his glass lightly. "Don't try it," he said without looking up. "My source is too reliable to be questioned."

Napoleon looked away, staring out of the window. "It was nothing," he stated. "We didn't-" he stopped himself, not quite able to go through with the lie. "It was nothing," he repeated instead.

"You were trying to be discreet?" Jacinto's tone was mocking.

Napoleon did not smile at the comment. "Evidently I didn't try hard enough. Shit." The last word was said in a whisper as he leaned forward and rested his elbows on his thighs. Both hands clutching the glass.

"Feeling guilty about it?" Jacinto raised his blonde eyebrows.

Napoleon's face darkened as he looked back at his friend, his temper changing suddenly. "You're not my fucking priest."

Jacinto hadn't quite expected Napoleon to take the comment so personally and tried to salvage the mood. "I wasn't criticising-"

"Yes you were." He knew his friend too well to not see the hidden reproach. "I needed a fuck. She was there. That's all it was," he stated, defending his actions.

Jacinto raised his hands in peace. "You have needs, we all do. I understand that." He was quickly realising that there were a number of reasons why Napoleon had sought him out that evening, some of them more self-serving than others. He didn't need to relax his emotional shields to understand that.

Napoleon looked up. "You're not the only one with problems, alright?"

"Never said I was, but then I don't have the same obligations as you." Jacinto wasn't trying to hurt his friend, but he deliberately brought the matter to the surface, only partly because it was evident that, despite Napoleon's reluctance to show it, it was something he wanted to talk about.

The man in question risked getting fully angry. "Makoto isn't an obligation," he snapped. "You don't understand what it's like. You don't have a wife refusing all fucking forms of intimacy with you just because she's terrified of having kids that you'll outlive."

The revelation as to the root cause of Makoto's current state of introversion was not completely surprising to Jacinto, but it had never been confirmed before. It seemed the evening was fast becoming a night of confessions. "At least you have a wife," he said as he pulled out a wooden box and a lighter from his desk drawer, sensing that their conversation was going to be a long one.

Napoleon calmed down quickly at the comment, remembering that his purpose in coming was to cheer up his friend and not to air out his own grievances.

But the subject had already been brought to the surface, and since they had started opening doors usually so tightly locked up, Jacinto didn't shy away from the matter. "She's still not talking to you?" he asked.

Napoleon shook his head. "We were supposed to have dinner together last night but she didn't show, I suppose she thought it would be a bit much seeing me two days in a row. By now I shouldn't be so disappointed."

From the fact that Napoleon did not appear surprised that Jacinto didn't react to his explanation of why his relationship with Makoto was crumbling, Jacinto assumed that Napoleon must have thought it was already common knowledge. A swift pang of guilt made itself felt at not having approached his friend sooner to see if he'd needed to talk. "It's not your fault, Leo," he said, offering sympathy. "You're doing the best you can, given the circumstances."

"Yeah, well, it's not how we thought forever would be," he said as he sat back into the couch and taking another sip.

"No, it definitely isn't." Jacinto tossed his friend a cigar along with the cutter. "She's never heard of contraception?" he asked as he lit up and then passed the lighter on as well.

Napoleon took it and lit his own cigar. "It's not just the risk of pregnancy that's gotten her like this." He drew in deeply and then exhaled the white smoke before speaking again. "She's generally depressed about it, you know? We made all these plans, for years even. How many we were going to have, how many boys, girls. We'd even picked out names." He took in another deep drag, the words rushing out as smoothly as the clouded air from his lungs. "She can't even look at me if we're in the same room. I think there are times when she feels like the whole world is to blame and then sometimes she feels like it's all her fault."

Everyone knew that there had been a rift between the first couple to have been married amongst the Shitennou and Senshi. But it had been so gradual to crack and spread, and with all of their lives having changed so drastically, no one had really noticed it until it had become an unbridgeable gulf between the pair. No one had even been certain what had been the chief cause, until now at least, although most had suspected. "Has she talked to any of the others in the same situation?"

Napoleon raised his eyebrows in mock amusement. "And just who would these others be? Dimi and Nitty? Luna and Artemis? Their kids are going to live longer than we are."

"Not them." Jacinto took another drag.

"Then who? The Outers? They have Hotaru, one of their own to raise. You know who that leaves?" He left the rest of the list unsaid, knowing that he did not need to mention the obvious.

Jacinto gave his friend a sour look, acknowledging his point: Rei was going to be celibate for the rest of her unnaturally long life, the last thing on her ridiculously stubborn mind was children. Ami already had them, millions of them: they were her life's work. They took up more time than there were hours in the day for and she had little, if any time, for anything else. As for Minako... children were not brought up. Ever. Not after what the Freeze had done to her and her family.

Napoleon looked out of the window, watching the last rays of the vibrant orange sunlight as it faded into deep violet. "I don't know what to do."

"But she can conceive, can't she?" Jacinto asked. "I mean, her plumbing's ok?"

"Yeah, it's fine."

"Then maybe one day she'll be ready."

"The situation's never going to change. Our offspring are going to be mortal, that's just the way it's going to be. How can you ever be ready for something like that? Look at Cairo and Minako." Napoleon shook his head lightly. "She's lost Jace, and I don't know how to reach her."

Jacinto gave him a sympathetic smile. "I'm sorry, friend, I don't know what to tell you."

They sat in silence for a while, watching as the sky darkened to evening.

"Fucking Ami and her big mouth," Napoleon said finally.

"Come on," Jacinto said, frowning. "Tell me that you're not still angry at her."

"Always will be."

"How can you even try and blame Ami? It's not like she had any other choice. They made her check the twins the second they were born. Was she supposed to lie to all of us? To Cairo, of all people? How long would that have lasted?"

"It was the hopelessness of it all. They way she-"

"Stop." Jacinto took a puff of his own cigar. "It would have been far worse to find out after you guys had kids. And let's not forget that they would have been obliterated along with everyone else during the Freeze anyway, even if she hadn't said anything. That might have been a big clue."

Napoleon scoffed. "Trust you to jump in and defend the bitch. It wouldn't surprise me if you were still fucking her."

Despite how blatantly obvious it was that the comment was said purely to spite him, Jacinto had to hold in a breath to prevent himself from giving in to it. "It was once, you know that."

Napoleon looked at him incredulously. "You were caught once. That's not the same thing."

Jacinto he let the remark drop, unable to defend against it. "Look what losing Airi and Owain did to those two. You think Makoto is bad now, imagine how she'd have been if she'd actually had children to metaphorically bury - because you know full well what happened to those who didn't survive the transition."

"Ami could be wrong," Napoleon said, still unwilling to accept the rationality of Jacinto's argument. "Just because she spends her whole life staring at fucking computers doesn't mean that she's right about everything." Napoleon angrily stubbed out the end of his cigar in the pre-Crys-T glass ashtray on the table next to him. Even as he said it, he knew in his heart that she hadn't made a mistake, Minako and Cairo had provided them with irrefutable evidence. "How could she be so sure that every single one of our progeny would be born human?" he asked anyway, unable to settle with the rational part of himself.

"Our power comes from the past, to even have a chance for anyone else to inherit our abiliti-"

"I know, I know." Napoleon's gaze became fierce. "I get what Nitty would have to do, but come on, if she knew anything about Makoto, Ami should have told us as a couple before the others. The way she went about it was all wrong. Makoto should have been given time to process it before hitting us all with the news about the Freeze approaching."

Jacinto shook his head, unwilling to let the blame be shifted so unjustly. "You don't think she was scared, too? She found out billions of people were going to die, Minako's newborns among them. Fine," he conceded, "she didn't deliver the news in the best way possible and because of that Makoto took it far too hard, but how can you be angry at her for that? Can you really blame her for not immediately and correctly predicting the future, for not considering the aftermath in the face of approaching Armageddon? Really?"

"We lost them all anyway, didn't we? It wasn't like her rush to reveal all changed anything." Jacinto tried to speak but Napoleon wouldn't let him. "I could have helped her through it!" The blond could feel Napoleon's helplessness seep out as the pretext was dropped and the true reason for his frustrated anger revealed itself. "But she wouldn't let me… All those years of watching Makoto fall apart... Of her saying nothing while she suffered in her own stupid, tormented thoughts." Napoleon looked at Jacinto, his face sympathetic. "I love Ami, I really do, she's a sister in all but blood and I would die for her any day. But I'll never forgive her."

"You're shooting the messenger. You're looking for someone to blame when it's no-one's fault, Leo."

Napoleon shrugged, giving up the fight. "Maybe I am." He reached his hand out. "Another cigar would make me feel a hell of a lot better about it, though."

Jacinto smiled and tossed him another.

"You need to get away from here," Napoleon said after a long pause.

"What do you mean?" Jacinto picked up another cigar for himself.

"What I said. Away, as in not staying in Crys-T. A change of scenery would do you some good, maybe somewhere like Barbados, with the sunshine, or Hawaii, somewhere where you can surf again, you used to be into all that ocean-hippie bullshit." He put the cigar to his lips and lit it.

Jacinto raised his eyebrows. "It's been a long time since I've done anything like that."

Napoleon rolled his eyes. "Whatever. My point is that sitting there sighing isn't going to help your situation. You need to forget about it." He tossed back the lighter. "You and Rei, it isn't going to happen. Maybe you should try moving on."

Jacinto smiled at both the sudden switch of topic and at the impossibility of the suggestion. "I could offer you the same advice."

Napoleon blew out a puff of smoke and waved the cigar in his hand from side to side. "Can't do that. There's a difference with me. Like you said before, I'm already committed. I made that promise to stick with her, you know? Through everything."

Jacinto decided to avoid mentioning that Napoleon had also vowed to stay faithful.

"But you," Napoleon pointed with his cigar hand, "you're free and single. You can keep looking."

"For what? The love of my life?" Jacinto's lips curled with sarcasm.

Napoleon titled his head slightly and rubbed his forehead with his index and middle finger. "Maybe you'll find another, if you try hard enough."

"I don't think that's how it's meant to work."

"Says who?"

Jacinto huffed. "And then what? Get married? Outlive her and the kids?"

Napoleon didn't rise to the bait. "Then don't settle. Fuck a girl a night if you really want, just stop weighing yourself down when you don't have to."

"The way I feel isn't exactly a choice."

Napoleon gave a sigh of his own. "Maybe love isn't designed to be forever." He stood up and moved towards the window. "You mind if I..."

"Sure." Jacinto reached into one of the other desk drawers and pulled out a key. "Here." he said as he tossed it over.

Napoleon gave a small laugh. "You still keep your window locked? You think someone's stupid enough to break into the main palace of Crystal Tokyo?"

Jacinto took in a puff of his cigar, leaving it hanging in his mouth as he spoke. "Old habits, I suppose."

Once he'd turned the lock and opened the window as wide as it would go, Napoleon leaned out, resting his elbows on the ledge and taking in a deep breath. "I love the night air."

"I'm not loving the view of your ass."

"Like fuck you aren't," Napoleon replied without looking back, or changing his position. "Look at our city. If there's one thing to make the heart of a man swell, it's her." He drew in another deep puff of his cigar, exhaling slowly and watching as the air currents played with it, twisting it away. "Millions and millions of little lights flashing from here to beyond the horizon - all those bright colours, like stars." He looked up. "Just like up there." He turned back to look at Jacinto, a smile on his face. "Heaven and Earth, perfect mirrors of each other."

Jacinto joined him by the window and took a glance up at the black abyss, the lights from the city blocking out the starlight. "We can't see what you see."

"More's the pity for you, friend."

They stopped talking for a while as they took in Crystal Tokyo by night. It was moving, alive and sprawled to beyond the line of sight. People walked and ran, worked and slept, created a pulse, an energy just like any other city from before the Freeze, except the difference here was that the two men could no longer consider themselves a part of it. Instead they stood a step back, watching, ruling from on high, their unnatural life spans separating them from their own people.

"So you're getting divorced at some point?" Jacinto finally asked, breaking their reverie.

"What?"

"Love isn't eternal according to you."

Napoleon shoved him. "Marriage is. Till death do us part, and since we're living forever..."

"A hundred thousand years isn't forever," Jacinto corrected.

"Danny says that's a conservative figure, actually. He says it could be up to five hundred thousand, maybe more."

The thought didn't sit well with Jacinto at all. "What does he know?"

"As much as Ami, definitely. Probably more."

Jacinto smirked. "Care to bet on that?"

Napoleon frowned. "How do you expect to measure it?"

"See how many places have been named after them," Jacinto suggested, pulling out a handheld device from his pocket.

"Even I know that's a shitty way of gathering evidence."

Jacinto didn't care. "Loser gets to be the one to tell Cairo that Minako totalled his Rolls two nights ago."

"Fuck off!" Napoleon's eyes were wide with shock at the revelation. "The two thousand and three Phantom?"

"Yes."

"Are you fucking serious?!"

Jacinto was laughing as he nodded his head.

"How hasn't he noticed yet?"

"She covered it with a dust shield," he said as he took in another puff, "and he's been busy."

"How the hell did she manage to crash it?" Napoleon was still in disbelief. "We have fucking auto-pilot and invisible shields dividing lanes! We have com-stoppers and auto-speed reds and monitors on every corner! For fuck's sake, blind people drive! Crashing a car nowadays is almost impossible. Did something break down?"

"She was coming out of a club completely shit-faced, apparently," Jacinto said, still smiling.

"What's new?"

"I've got the surveillance video if you want to look at it later. Once she told me what happened I had to see it for myself."

"Is it hilarious?"

"Of course it is. She indicated left to change lanes, the _invis_ opened up to let her through, and for no reason whatsoever, she swerved right instead. Drove right into the _invis_ that separated the road from the pavement. The force was so strong part of the car crashed through and knocked over a lightpost."

Napoleon shook his head. "She couldn't drive a car back then, she definitely can't drive one now. What was she doing setting it to manual? That's for emergencies only. She should have auto-piloted."

"That's what I told her."

"And what did she say?"

"That we have privileges and she felt like using them."

Napoleon had to laugh at that. "Fucking Minako. That girl's got balls."

"Bullshit she does. She's forcing _me_ to tell Cairo that his antique, pre-CT, luxury, petrol engine Rolls Royce, is now a pile of shitty scrap metal and burnt leather."

"Ah, fuck! The real fucking leather!" Napoleon had forgotten about that. Killing animals for food or their hides had been banned as soon as cloning technology had advanced enough to make suitable meat and hide substitutes. Neither were ever quite as good as the originals though, and any products leftover from before the Freeze which contained the latter tended to skyrocket in value. "Let's change the subject before I actually get depressed."

Jacinto smiled and flicked through his handheld device. "There are..." he tapped a few things before he came up with an answer, "seventy eight thousand, five hundred and sixty three locations, buildings, institutions and businesses named after either 'Daniel Zephyr' or 'Zoisite'."

"Is that global?"

"What do you think? And now," he tapped on his handheld again and then suddenly smiled. "Yes!" he said, shoving the mini-computer into Napoleon's face. "One hundred and sixty four thousand nine hundred and ninety eight for Ami Zephyr, and that's not even looking at the name 'Mercury'."

"All it shows is that she's more popular than he is." Napoleon was pissed off now that he had lost. "It doesn't make her smarter."

"You're telling Cairo about his car."

"Fuck no. It was a shitty bet and I still think I'm right."

Jacinto was not going to let him back out, not when the task at stake was so unpleasant. "Maybe you are, but you agreed to the rules. You're not getting out of it, you're honour bound."

"Fuck you," Napoleon muttered before throwing his head back and silently cursing his own stupidity. Cairo was going to be beyond furious when he told him, and he was going to have to bear the brunt of the initial wrath. He considered telling him in a public place so he couldn't destroy anything, but then abandoned the idea, deciding that it wouldn't matter anyway. Cairo could be an unusually patient man. He had an uncanny ability to contain his rage until he felt it was appropriate to release it, waiting, letting it build until he decided it was the right time to let loose on some poor, unsuspecting victim - and that poor, unsuspecting victim would inevitably be the messenger, i.e. him, since there was no way Cairo would go near Minako, especially not to yell at her. He started contemplating how he could convince Endymion to do it instead.

"So love isn't eternal?" Jacinto asked, going back to their previous topic of conversation. "How does that work? It lasts for long enough to help the average person procreate and then what? It dies when they do? How long do you think that is? Fifty years? A century? And if we live longer than the average lifespan, what does it do then? Disappear? You think love can do that? Just disappear because it's time has run out?"

"I fucking hope so, between your constant pining and my wife's descent into becoming an emotionless and completely unreachable ghost of a person, I don't see the point. It's just suffering. I'm sick of suffering, aren't you?"

"We all are."

"Yeah, no joke. Cairo may look like he's a fucking machine, but he feels the exact same way. I can see it in his eyes. I don't need your power to see that. He wishes he could stop loving her more than anything else on this Earth."

The corners of Jacinto's mouth lifted slightly. "Well, now we know she's not as over him as she makes people think she is. As if that wasn't obvious anyway."

"She didn't have to crash the fucking Phantom to do it, though."

"No."

"Fucking Minako and her driving." Napoleon shook his head. "What a waste."

"Her or the car?"

"Both, I suppose. The kicker is he'd probably take her back. No matter what she does to him, if he thought she was serious, he'd accept her back, no questions."

"And you wouldn't?" Jacinto asked, not believing for a second that Napoleon would have had any more of an ability than their Kunzite to resist the Senshi of Love and Duty if he had been in their leader's shoes.

"Not a chance." Napoleon laughed mockingly at the very idea. He stopped when he saw that Jacinto was looking at him like a crazy person. "Ok, maybe I would. She _is_ the most fuckable woman I have ever laid eyes on."

"Oh you noticed that, did you?"

"Well yeah, there's no denying that, but she's the worst kind of woman."

"We all have our opinions."

"I mean it as a fact."

Jacinto was curious how Napoleon was going to explain his ludicrous statement. "How do you figure?"

"She believes that has more problems than anyone else, for one, and she carries them around with her."

"But doesn't she?"

Napoleon explained it to him. "Was what happened to her tragic? Yes, epically so. No one deserved the pain she went through, especially not one of us, but she was not the only one to lose people in the Freeze."

"I don't understand how that makes her such a terrible person to date."

"Well, secondly, she thinks she's better than us for what she does but at the same time she doesn't think she's good enough for anything, and that's a breeding ground for unhealthy head space. The weight on her shoulders has destroyed her. She's broken goods, Jace."

Jacinto let out a laugh. "Who isn't?" He wasn't learning anything he didn't already know.

"Yeah well, this particular woman intentionally fucks with you just to push you away, but she's always hoping that you'll come back for more. In fact, she's counting on it, and did you notice that any time Cairo has gone back to her, he's come out of it a little bit closer to being the cold bastard he was back in the Silver Millennium. That woman's not worth the mental anguish she causes, I don't care how bendy she is or how wonderful a person she used to be."

Jacinto looked at his friend with a sort of amused amazement. "Some girl seriously pulled a number on you."

"Pot calling the kettle black there, friend."

Jacinto raised his blond eyebrows and tilted his head slightly once. "The difference is, Rei is worth the mental anguish she causes." He paused for a second as he thought about it. "At least she would be if she would just let me slip it into her once in a while. I could fucking rock her world."

Napoleon started laughing out loud and shaking his head. "Usually you're so poetic when it comes to your supposed soul mate."

"You try going half a century not getting laid by the woman you want."

"Looks like I'm heading in that direction with the way things are going."

"So tell me about the one before. The woman that gave you all this insight, the one that wasn't worth the mental anxiety."

Napoleon smiled. "I barely remember her." He laughed, looking down at his feet as he shifted his weight from his right to his left leg. "But she was crazy. An absolute wreck of a person, poor thing."

"Was she amazing in bed?"

"The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice, as Danny used to say." Napoleon's mood suddenly deflated. "Makoto was the sweetest thing I'd ever met, nothing like anyone I'd ever been with, you know? Kind, whole, strong willed... When I found out she wanted to try, to see if we could make it work this time around, I felt blessed. She was good for me."

Jacinto smirked. "Yes, I remember. She was all you talked about for months. You were irritating, to say the least. We often discussed duck-taping your mouth shut while you slept and other such things when you weren't around. Some were pretty creative."

"Nice." Napoleon's lip had curled up with a look of annoyance. "It's wonderful to see how my closest friends celebrated my happiness."

"We could have abandoned you completely," Jacinto pointed out. "Zephyr seriously tried to convince Dimi to do it, you know."

"I almost wish you had. Up until the Freeze we were blissful. I never expected for her to have even considered being with me, you know? Much less marry me, I mean, especially after Rei- you know..." he was reluctant to continue his sentence.

Jacinto was not, the memory of those days still stung vividly and when he spoke, his voice was peppered with bitterness. "What? After she tore my heart out when I told her that I loved her? After I lost all dignity begging and crying for forgiveness she wouldn't give? After she ruined me, body, mind and soul, so that no-one else will ever compare?"

"You're painting a pretty pathetic picture of yourself."

"You should take a look in a mirror."

Napoleon took in a deep breath. "I suppose I should be thankful for the years I've had with her." He hung his head and closed his eyes.

"She's not dead, you know."

"I've seen her for about two weeks this year if you add it all up." Napoleon threw his cigar butt out into the night, knowing that a cleanerbot would probably find it and dispose of it properly in less than a minute. "She deliberately avoids me. I try to talk to her and she won't listen. She doesn't pick up her com when I call, she doesn't even come to meetings if I'm on the attendance list. I'm lucky if I go to bed and she's in there, even then, I can barely touch her. She won't let me help her." He looked helpless. "She's stopped cooking and training completely; she doesn't do her hospital runs; she's not even working properly anymore. Apparently Rei, Nitty and Michi have been covering most of it."

"What does she do all day?"

"I've heard she spends her time in the Royal Botanical Gardens. She just... wanders around. All day. Staring at flowers or the glass ceiling or ants and shit. I don't know."

Jacinto nodded. "Have you considered talking to her there? Somewhere where she's comfortable?"

"I don't want to chase her away from the one place she seems to be happy in. If I started going there, she'd stop." His fist clenched. "It's like she's punishing me."

"She'll accept it one day." Jacinto patted him on the back. "She'll forget what could have been or should have been and she'll remember what she has." Napoleon looked at him like he didn't believe a word of what he was saying. He kept talking anyway. "She'll come back to you, she just needs time," he put his glass down on the desk and picked up the bottle, twisting it open and offering it to Napoleon, "which, fortunately for us, is something we have a lot of. Another drink?"

"Yes! Fill the fucking glass." Jacinto did as he was asked and Napoleon waited until he had finished before continuing on. "Why does she need children so badly, anyway? Was I not enough for her? Was what we had so unimportant?"

"Hell if I know, you're asking the wrong person. I'm the last man to figure that one out."

"Why are women like that?" Napoleon asked, continuing his soliloquy. "They need so much! What more can I give her? She has all of me!"

"Like you said, these particular women are all broken goods. Sometimes you just can't fix them." He took a small sip of his own drink.

"This is a ridiculous reason for her to be like this, you know." Jacinto was quiet, letting his friend rant. "I mean seriously, every other person we've cared for has died, and yet we move on. We don't even have fucking kids and already she's mourning them." Napoleon let out a sigh. "She always thought they were the meaning of life, you know? That's what you're meant to do, raise children. I see it in her, she feels useless, like there's nothing left for her in this world."

"Women all think differently, they have each have different priorities. I don't think you can really tell her if what she thinks is right or wrong."

"What's the good news?"

"I suppose in the end, they need us just as much as we do them. She'll come around."

"I'll believe it when I see it happen. Women can hang on to a lot of shit."

"That's true. Rei still thinks it's a good idea to be celibate." Jacinto swirled the amber liquid in his glass. "There's no reason for it, really, other than the fact that she's the most stubborn person I've ever met."

Napoleon eyed him up. "It was a vow, you know. Those things are meant to be kept. She doesn't have much else of her past to hold onto."

Jacinto frowned, he knew it was true but he was annoyed that Napoleon was sympathising with her. "You called it childish earlier."

"I still think it is, but she made it. It's been done and you can't blame her for sticking to it, no matter the reason."

"You haven't exactly kept up all of your vows, either."

"Hey, my heart's never wandered."

"Your dick has, though." Jacinto let the remark slip out of spite.

Napoleon knew why his friend was suddenly on edge but he let out a comment of his own, anyway. "At least I didn't fuck another Senshi. That was a line you weren't supposed to cross."

"Back off with that, already!" He couldn't help the outburst, despite the transparency of Napoleon's intention. "You don't know what happened! Ami was having trouble dealing with Zephyr," he explained, "and Rei… she just has this ability to… to twist the knife into you so fucking deep." He looked down into his drink, as if the memories hurt him. "You're a lucky son of a bitch, you know that?" he said eventually. "No, you couldn't know. You have no idea. You got the best one out of them all." He laughed and corrected himself. "Well, the most normal anyway."

Napoleon took a good look at Jacinto's face, his temper having dissipated at his friend's pitiful state. "We were all normal at some point. Minako was great until she cracked and decided to pull a permanent Lindsey Lohan."

"Lindsey who?"

Napoleon didn't say anything for a moment as he assessed whether Jacinto was kidding.

Jacinto couldn't understand what he'd said to be stared at. "What?"

"Are you telling me you don't remember her?"

"I gather she was also a former child-actress turned superhero who ruined herself through excessive drinking and partying after she helped establish a world-changing city and watched her loved ones die in front of her as a result?"

"How the hell do you not remember her?" Napoleon looked at his friend with sheer disbelief. "You used to make fun of her every time you saw her on the news."

Jacinto was still drawing a blank. "It was over half a millennium ago, I can't remember every person I mocked."

"You're useless."

"I remember Al Pacino, the Marx Brothers and Beyoncé, they're the important ones… and Willem Dafoe. He was cool."

"Willem who?"

Jacinto smiled. "Now who's useless?"

"Fuck off, I didn't spend my university years sitting around all day complaining about how everyone else's knowledge of the film industry was woefully inadequate."

Jacinto laughed. "I wasted a lot of time watching a lot of shit," he admitted.

"It made you interesting," Napoleon said. "And you enjoyed it. There's nothing wrong with that."

"We've changed, Leo. I don't think I'd recognise myself if I went back to before the Freeze."

"That's meant to be part of life, isn't that what they say? Change is good, right?"

"Makoto was happy back then," Jacinto noted. "Not all change is good."

"No, it isn't," Napoleon said quietly.

"Rei wasn't so malicious," Jacinto added after a moment's contemplation.

"Really?" The tone in Napoleon's voice was dubious.

Jacinto gave out a small grunt. "Maybe she was, at least she was after she figured out who we really were; before that she was great around me."

"I was nicer. Remember that?" Napoleon nudged him. "Remember when I could actually tolerate people for longer than a minute?"

"I have noticed that you've gotten a little testy in your 'old age'." Jacinto used his fingers for quotation marks.

Napoleon nodded. "I fear I'm becoming the Howard Hughes of Crys-T."

"Yeah, I've been meaning to ask you about that. I got your memo a few weeks back, you've made it official policy now that you don't shake hands with people?"

Napoleon didn't deny it. "It's just becoming difficult. It's an odd sensation, you know? Making physical contact with a person and not feeling the same kind of energy flowing through them as you have."

Jacinto frowned. "You find that weird? That reciprocal energy isn't supposed to feel normal, that's what distinguishes us."

"Well to me it feels strange not sensing it. It's like they're all dead. I can't smell their energy, I can barely feel anything with them."

"But you'll fuck them?" Jacinto reminded him, still not understanding.

"That's different." Napoleon was serious. "That's to satisfy an urge and even then I keep it to a bare minimum. I don't make a connection with any of those women, I don't feel the same way as I do when I'm with Makoto."

"You feel that way because you love her," Jacinto tried.

"That's not the only thing. Humans are fundamentally different from us, don't you sense it? Don't you feel like something is missing with them?"

"I do feel that they're different than us, but it doesn't upset me."

"Well it does me."

"We're all human. Other people aren't lesser beings just because they don't have the same powers as we do," Jacinto was beginning to wonder if he should become concerned.

"I didn't say that."

"No, but you sound like you're becoming xenophobic of your own people."

"They're not my people," Napoleon stated firmly. "The Shitennou and Senshi, Dimi and Nitty, you're my people. This place…this-" he gestured to the surrounding city, "this magnificence that we're creating, it's not for us, we're just the architects. It's our labour of love but we can't live in it. We're not a part of it and I suppose I'm feeling that drift away from them already. It's depressing, I don't like it, so the less physical contact with them, the better."

Napoleon was not the only one to feel that way, but no-one had dared say it out loud before. Jacinto swallowed heavily, deeply unsettled by the truth of it, his own deep, hidden thoughts just as dark.

"Give us a few more centuries. Once this planet is fully assimilated, this palace will be nothing more than a museum to them, maybe a temple if we're lucky," Napoleon said. "They're not going to need us anymore, they'll want real elections, people just like them to rule. People who will be able to 'understand' who they are and what they want. We'll lose touch with them, hell, they might even fear us."

Jacinto deliberately relaxed his guard in order to channel what his friend was feeling, dismissing his own discomfort in favour of mirroring Napoleon's conviction. "Until they'll need us to save them from something," he admitted when he felt more comfortable.

Napoleon agreed. "A deus ex machina, that's all we'll be."

"That's all we've ever been, if you think about it. We come in and save the Earth in its most desolate hours."

"Or destroy it," Napoleon dared to say and then wondered if the alcohol was affecting him enough to make him loose-lipped, or if he'd just been desperately looking for an excuse to to talk to someone about it.

"Even then," since Napoleon was in the mood to make daring statements, Jacinto felt he could air his own as well, "I wonder if that wasn't what we were put there for."

Napoleon gave him a side-long glance. "Don't ever try telling Cairo that."

"I'm not suicidal," Jacinto said. "Not yet, anyway," he added as an afterthought.

"Look what happens to us though, in between all the saving we're meant to do. We wait and we self-destruct." Napoleon smirked. "Remember Cairo before the Freeze? When he wasn't such a shit-scary terror."

Jacinto nodded. "And Zeph wasn't so obsessive about his work," he laughed. "Isn't that something? I miss him being such an asshole."

"Oh, in a way Danny's still the same arrogant little shit, you just don't see enough of him to notice."

"Yeah well, I burnt that bridge pretty thoroughly."

"You did fuck his wife."

Jacinto stood up from leaning on the window ledge. "Third time's enough!" he exclaimed, although by that point the anger had all but dissipated.

Napoleon even chuckled. "You brought it up this time."

"Well you didn't need to continue." Jacinto downed the remainder of his glass in a large gulp. "They were separating!" he burst out after a brief moment of silence. "He didn't have the right to get so ridiculous over it."

Napoleon repeated his point, hoping it would help his friend understand. "Jace, you _fucked_ his _wife_. Do you get it?"

"So? How many other men's wives was he fucking when he was with Ami?" he brought his cigar to his lips, but stopped in favour of adding another point to his argument. "Why did he get to be the victim?"

"Because he didn't cheat on her with one of our own."

Jacinto dismissed the idea as stupid with a grunt and a wave of his hand.

"Those people out there, they're not us, they come and they'll go just as easily."

"Is that what you tell yourself to feel better about what you do?" Jacinto asked as he took a long drag from his cigar.

"Don't even try and compare the two. You messed with his soul mate, you know that. You really don't need me to tell you the difference."

"Cheating is cheating."

"Agreed, but cheating with one of us is…" he was momentarily lost for the right word, "it's a fucking _betrayal_."

"Why?!" Jacinto demanded. "Why is it so unreasonable? Who else understands us better than our own?"

Napoleon sighed. "That's what makes it so terrible. You should have known better."

Jacinto went quiet. He looked out into the night as if he was debating whether or not it was a good idea to tell Napoleon something. Eventually he turned to his friend, his blue eyes slightly glassy from the alcohol and the smoke. "I don't regret it, you know. I mean, I know it was a mistake," he added the last part to stop Napoleon from interrupting, "but I don't regret what happened."

That made Napoleon angry. "Well, you fucking should. You ruined a lot of good shit."

Jacinto shrugged. "Zephyr deserved it. You don't know how he hurt Ami when she found out he was fucking around. And Rei?" He shook his head. "At least I got her to feel some of the pain she'd been inflicting."

"It fucked up any chances you had with her."

Jacinto looked at him incredulously. "Like I had a shot in hell with her before? The only difference now is that it's actually sunken in that I don't have a chance, and she's stopped being so vindictive over the past."

Napoleon scoffed. "You think what you did helped the relationship between you two?"

The anger was beginning to return. "What fucking relationship?! At least now she's civil. At least now…" he stopped himself for a moment, controlling his temper. "At least now when she looks me in the eye, she understands the pain that she puts me through every fucking day."

Napoleon sipped his whisky and watched Jacinto for a few seconds. "You can be just as malicious as she can."

"I didn't mean it earlier." Jacinto put his glass on the window ledge and used his hand to rub the tiredness from his face. "She's not malicious."

Napoleon laughed. "She can be very-"

"She's not," Jacinto interrupted. "She's stubborn and hurt. It's not malice. She doesn't forgive, that's all it is. You could count the people she really trusts on one hand." He looked at Napoleon. "And you're one of them, you lucky son of a bitch." He smiled. "I think I've called you that once already tonight."

"You have."

"I love her, Leo, and she knows it more than anything else on Earth," he took in a deep lungful of the air, "and it doesn't make a damned difference to her."

Napoleon couldn't help feeling a little guilty. "I'm sorry I get along with Rei and you don't. If I could help, I would."

"Yeah, I know."

"She does love you," he tried.

Jacinto gave him a smile and a pat on the back in thanks. "She hates me more," he said.

The two stopped talking for a while, both contemplating their own issues, each leaning on either side of the window and staring out into the cool night air.

"I almost feel like we were back in time right now, you know? Before the Freeze."

Jacinto looked at his friend and took another careful sip of his whisky. "Yeah?"

"Yeah, except for one thing."

"The noise?"

Napoleon pointed at Jacinto, acknowledging that he'd gotten the right answer. "The noise," he repeated, "or rather, the lack of it. The city's a great, silent light show. No rush of engines, no honking, no yelling, no sirens. Civil people and quiet hums." He looked down at his glass and took another gulp, swallowing it down slowly. "This goes down very smooth," he said, "doesn't burn at all." The thought of having no more bottles of his own making him resent the diplomat who took it all the more.

"Do you miss it?"

"The noise?" Napoleon questioned. At Jacinto's nod he continued. "No, why would I do that?"

"Some people think it's boring."

"I've been to places which still use fossil fuels, the ones that haven't been able to convert yet." Napoleon sneered. "The air chokes you, you can feel the filth coating your skin and it's horrible. You breathe in sickness and the whole city tastes vile. I don't know how we managed to live on a world like that, where thousands of people died every second for no reason other than our own senseless stupidity." He took another sip. "Let them think this city is boring. They're the idiots who don't deserve to be here anyway."

"Isn't it your job to convince them otherwise?"

Napoleon shrugged. "Do you miss it?"

"A world of destruction? Are you kidding?" Jacinto shook his head. "I believe in what we're doing, even if it means that we have to sacrifice for it."

"As sacrifices go, we're getting off pretty damn lightly, to be honest." Napoleon had had enough of their depressing conversation and sought to turn it around; the original plan, after all, had been to cheer up his friend on the anniversary of one of the worst days he'd ever had. "I mean, sure, we've outlived everyone we've ever loved and cared for, with the exception of a select few, of course."

"Oh, of course."

"And yes, granted, those that are with us seem to be drifting away and are becoming cold shells of their former selves."

Jacinto watched as Napoleon carefully took the last sip of his drink. "I fail to see how we've 'gotten off lightly'."

"Well," Napoleon paused for a moment, savouring the aftertaste. "We're technically kings of the fucking planet for one. At least, in name we are. That's not nothing, right? We get to drink for free, eat for free, live in a giant crystal palace... We're invited to all the best venues, we basically have free run of the whole world..."

Jacinto chimed in for good measure. "We get to serve one of the best men creation has ever offered, we get superpowers, we're devilishly good-looking and we have our health."

Napoleon smiled broadly. "Hell, we're going to live forever."

"Five hundred thous-"

"It might as well be." Napoleon cut Jacinto off quickly before he could repeat his correction about their lifespan. "We're practically invincible. Do you realise the last time I had a cold was back in nineteen ninety nine?"

Jacinto lifted his eyebrows. "Are you serious?"

"What?"

"You remember the year you last got a cold?"

"Of course I do, my aunt thought it had something to do with the Millennium Bug. She thought it was some sort of virus sent from the Soviet Union to destroy the west." At Jacinto's look and confusion, he clarified. "She'd taken a lot of LSD in the sixties. I missed a great Christmas party because of that stupid cold. She locked me in the spare room for a week and refused to let me eat anything but her bone-marrow soup, except that buying bones like that had become illegal because of mad cow disease, so it was just hot water with vegetables."

Jacinto shook his head with a smirk on his face. "You rich people were nuts."

"She was one cracker of a lady, though." Napoleon took a sip of his drink.

"You know David Cone threw a perfect game for the Yankees in nineteen ninety nine."

Napoleon rolled his eyes. "You don't remember the slutty redhead who was in the tabloids practically every day but you remember baseball stats, you can't call Danny boring."

Jacinto laughed at his audacity. "You realise that you watch cricket, right? A sport that makes watching Cairo as he signs documents look exciting?"

"You shut up with your blasphemous talking right now."

"Me not getting to say it out loud changes nothing." He went to retrieve the whisky bottle from the desk. "Shall we finish this off?" he asked.

Napoleon handed over his glass. "What do I do, Jace?"

"About what?"

Napoleon threw him a look that told him to be serious.

Jacinto shrugged as he poured the remained of the whisky out into both their glasses in even amounts. "There isn't much you can do, really. Except wait, and hope she comes to her senses."

Napoleon shook his head. "It fucking hurts."

"Tell me about it."

"How do you handle it?" Napoleon raked a hand through his dark hair. "How can you just sit there and let yourself burn away for her?"

Jacinto thought about his answer as he gave Napoleon back his glass. "She may think she's enough without me, but I know that I need her." This time it was Jacinto's turn to take a large swig from his drink. "I'd rather sit here pining after her like a pathetic loser than live my whole life without having loved her."

Napoleon looked at him seriously for a moment. "That doesn't help my situation at all. I was looking for something more constructive."

"It's been over five hundred and forty seven years and I still have yet to take my desired woman down to pleasure town. I've not gotten very far."

"To be fair, we were sleeping for about five of those centuries."

"It's still a shitty record. The best method I've found so far is this: you live with the pain and you bitch about it to your friends every year or so."

"Let's not forget the frequent fucking of inferior copies."

"No, we can't forget that."

"Don't you wish you didn't have to?"

"What? Fuck inferior copies? Yes, fucking the original would be nice once in a while."

Napoleon ignored the joke. "I meant caring. Don't you just wish that you could just switch it off and you could stop caring about her?"

Jacinto shook his head. "You really believe that whole 'love isn't meant to last for more than the lifespan of the average human' bullshit you spluttered out earlier?"

Napoleon smiled. "No."

"We're all suckers for pain, every last one of us." Jacinto raised his glass.

Napoleon clinked it with his. "Fucking women and their wily, womanly ways."

"Not to mention the perpetual state of anguish they leave us in."

"Fuck yes, friend." At Napoleon's statement, both men took long swigs of their drinks.

"Fuck yes, friend." Jacinto repeated and smiled contentedly. "Fuck yes."

They leant against the window in silence again, enjoying their rare night of companionship and shared angst. Below them, the silent city moved on.


	3. Trauma

Her ears weren't ringing, there was no feeling of them being stuffed with cotton, they certainly did not pound. In short, her hearing was in no way damaged. And Minako wasn't sure whether it was because their laws now dictated that music be played below a certain decibel or whether it was her body's superhuman ability to repair itself.

The second option left a bitter taste in the back of her throat, the bile seeping upwards. All the power that they held within themselves and still, she had failed.

Her breath hitched hard in her throat and her hand reached up to cover her neck, as if to push the threatening sob back down into her heart. Her fingers closed around her windpipe and clawed their way to the suprasternal notch, trailing pink scores down her neck until it reached the hollow. Once there her stomach lined itself instantly with leaden ice.

Without a second's thought she twisted herself, wrapping her body around the front seat and ignoring the auto-pilot warning to 'remain seated and secure at all times in the moving vehicle'. She searched briefly in the gloom of the backseat for her purse. When she found it, shimmering and dark on the floor, she readjusted herself into the driver's seat and began frantically dumping its contents onto the chair next to her, her eyes, wide with worry, skimming desperately over its contents, her whole body quaking as she searched. _Fuck, fuck, fuck!_ the word screamed through her mind and repeated itself over and over, like a prayer for help, until her frenzied hands finally touched a cold, thin chain of gold. She calmed instantly and lifted it, the heavy weight of a large golden heart locket dangling like a pendulum at the bottom. She didn't open it, choosing instead to clutch it to her heart, closing her eyes and biting her lip, silencing all the sound of her sorrow as she cried out heavy tears.

The crystal paradise outside her window sped past in blurs of light and reflection, shimmering with the colours of the rainbow, but all she saw was the dark abyss behind her eyelids and the hateful and cherished memories it brought with it. When she could take no more of it, when their faces began to focus too clearly in her mind - their features contorting too vividly with fear and despair - her eyes snapped open and they faded to the background.

It was the sheer amount of alcohol in her system which made her weak, no doubt. Minako had never been one to cry; unlike the Queen who wept at the drop of a hat (just as she had done when she had been known only as the teenaged girl 'Usagi'), Minako had never been able to shed tears easily. It had been her one bane as an actress.

She looked down and noticed that her shag for the night had torn her dress. The gold sequins glittered up at her with a gash from the hem up to her mid-thigh, threads of white cloth from the underlayer showing through, parting to reveal the smooth skin underneath. She cursed as she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, giving up on caring about the state of her appearance; her makeup had been smudged long before she had left the third night club and tumbled drunkenly into her husband's pride and joy, stolen for a night of oblivion and defiance.

He would do nothing, of course, when he found out. He would fume internally and she would rub salt into his wound, deeper and deeper, until he couldn't take it anymore. Then some poor soul would face his wrath. It would be simpler to yell and rant, but Cairo was not a simple man. Some were fired for minor mistakes, and they were lucky. Most would be humiliated somehow, usually in public, or roared at into fearful submission. Cairo held the power to make or destroy a person's livelihood with a sentence from his lips, his influence second only to the Royal Couple's. Hers, on the other hand... she scoffed at the thought.

Others would suffer for Minako's actions, but not her, Cairo never gave her the decency of actually blaming her for her own irresponsibility, for her own weaknesses. He never confronted her, he knew he could not. He knew what would happen if he did. He feared that fight as much as she sought for it, but even so, she was the bigger coward. _No, _she thought_, I am the only coward_. This life had ruined her, fate's blows too cruel.

She could not see ahead of her, her world filtered through an unfocused haze of salted water and memories as the dam which reigned in her tears broke again, letting loose a torrent from her golden eyes.

In one moment Cairo had burdened himself with her duty, he had stolen the role that should have been hers, rescued her from her terrible destiny.

Cairo had done what she could not.

He had destroyed the world and he had saved it, and in doing so he had become a monster and a saviour all at once. And the worst of it was she admired him for what he had done. She loved him more than she thought possible for his devotion, for his strength, for his ability to bear his burden. She could never be like him, she had proven it time and again.

So instead she gave him nothing but her contempt and her hate, her righteous fury ever brimming on the surface. Yet he never allowed her an excuse to release it and each time he denied her, she found herself more grateful than the last. To face him would not only be to face her own inaction, but it would break him too, with the atrocity he committed. Even so, despite knowing what it would do to him, how it could very well destroy him, she still she wanted it. She wanted to be allowed to release all of her fury at him, to tell him how much she hated him for what he had done, to let herself voice her pain, to hurt him as much as she loved him and to maybe... maybe start to feel better. For now she was trapped, caught between her pain and guilt and anger. The cycle crumbled everything she touched, it was turning Cairo cold and cruel, burdened already as he was with his crimes. Slowly it was happening but she could see it nonetheless, the more she toyed with him, taunted him with the threat of openly blaming him for what he had done, the deeper he was receding into himself. He was becoming the Kunzite again of the Silver Millennium.

"_Sensing high levels of stress and/or anxiety, do you require medical assistance?_"

The voice which pierced through her thoughts belonged to one of Zephyr's 'primary research assistants' and was now the standard for every auto-pilot system in the country. A long-legged, skinny brunette with an all too fake, eager-to-please smile. She was already despised by each of the Senshi for having flaunted her relationship with her superior so publicly, but at that moment if she were in the car with Minako, the Senshi would have ripped out the woman's voice box. "Just take me home!" she snapped.

"_Continuing on to current destination. Crystal Palace, twenty seven point four five kilometres remaining. Please remain seated at all times while the vehicle is in motion._"

Minako was about to smash her fist into the screen on the dashboard, but thought better of it. An involuntarily image of a disapproving glare from her husband floated through her agitated mind and her mood suddenly deflated from anger back to its original sense of misery. Cairo blamed her for his own guilt and he hated her for it, that she knew, but he could not help that he loved her more than it was meant to be possible for a man to feel. It was for that reason, not the disaster of their dying world, which had caused him to grip Usagi's shoulders at that crucial moment. Borne out of the love he held for Minako, he had spared her the agony of forcing the annihilation of billions, the deaths of those precious few, in order to save what was now left of humanity.

It had been Cairo who had taken a hold of Usagi, amid the screams of the dying and the great roars and cracks of the Earth falling apart, of people and animals and machines being swallowed into the giant fissures of concrete and metal. Towering structures quivering and tumbling down around them, crushing the fearful, hapless ants underneath. It had been Cairo who'd made her Princess command the use of the mighty Sailor Saturn.

It'd been Cairo who had taken everything from her.

In so many ways, death would have been the better option, but he was much too strong for that, and apparently he had thought that she was too.

He was wrong, and she would prove it.

"Papa Victor Cairo three, disable auto-pilot, engage manual." She sniffled heavily and rubbed the impending tears away, composing herself enough to sit up straight and grip the steering wheel, the golden locket wrapped tightly in her hand. The determination of the Soldier of Venus had taken over and her eyes froze to the colour of Arctic blue. Zephyr's lackey reared her ugly head again. "_Warning, autopilot is designed for a safer driving experience, manual drive should only be used in cases of extreme emergency. Are you sure you want to disab-_"

"Just engage the fucking manual drive!" Minako's fury doubled.

"_Autopilot disabled. Manual drive enabled. Please drive cautiously and obey road safety regulations._"

As if to deliberately spite the temerity of the vehicle's computer system, Minako's golden-stemmed foot pushed the pedal flush into the floor.

The Rolls Phantom was a smooth ride, even with over five hundred years on it. It was Cairo's, so it came as no surprise. He'd never actually worked on it himself, but no expense had been spared to restore it - parts were terribly hard to come by, especially for a petrol engine. The leather was real too, although how he managed that was a mystery - one of another million other things about him that Minako had yet to solve.

She indicated left and the _invis_ opened a hole which followed her car, running parallel with it. She eyed the opening, a gap in what was otherwise just a mutli-coloured sheen which gleamed like the skin of a soap bubble in between lanes. It was an invention from Zephyr's own mind, created to complement the auto-piloting system, although the design itself had come from Zephyr's many followers, the hateful voice most likely being one of them. They'd done something with the crystal, creating force fields which separated lanes, ensuring that cars could not swerve into others if there was a malfunction with the auto-drive. The gap kept following her as the Rolls Royce sped onwards through the empty night's road, Crys-T was not known for its traffic jams and even if it had been, Cairo's was a Palace Vehicle, the auto-pilot system on all other cars were programmed to move them out of its way.

It suddenly became a horrible game to Minako, she shifted gears into fourth, and then to fifth, trying ridiculously to beat the system, to outpace the gap. How fast she went she had no idea, nor did she care to check, her concentration was on the road ahead, on the hole in the shimmering wall to her left. A Rolls Royce was not a car designed for speed, even the Phantom, but she pushed it anyway, the hum of the engine turning to a soft growl as it raced along the smooth black strip ahead of her. She opened all of the windows and the wind suddenly began roaring through her hair, whipping it up into a hysterical, tangled mass of liquid gold.

The auto-pilot said something, what it was Minako had no idea, the whore's patronising blissfully drowned out by the cacophony of the engine noise and the crashing, freezing gale of the night. The necklace in her hand was warm but the chain, wrapped so tightly around her hand, bit into her fingers, making them throb and swell from lack of blood flow. She didn't care. All she saw was the gap alongside her. Her destiny riding with her, inescapable, a hole in her heart. She couldn't beat it, she hadn't beaten it.

She was furious. At Cairo, at the world, at herself. Her eyes spilt painful tears as the wind blasted her face, its iciness biting at her ears and cheeks and nose and fingers. Her head began to pound and the noise was deafening. The world swept past her, building after building after crystaline building. Their beautiful future mocking her cruelly.

She had indicated left. She gritted her teeth and swerved right instead, careening into the closed invisible barrier at full speed.

The car crumpled on impact and rolled, twice, three, four times before breaking through the _invis_ and skidding along the pavement until its path was brought abruptly to a halt by a light box, the Phantom upside down and steaming, its broken body having trailed in pieces behind it.

* * *

"Hold on, Minako," Ami was staring intently at the fuzzy black and white image on the screen, one hand on the keypad of the monitor, the other holding the ultrasound transducer upright on Minako's swollen belly. With a soft click she froze the image and peered closer.

"What is it?" Minako asked, a mixture of impatience and anticipation. She looked at Cairo, as if to make sure he was still alright with her asking that question, and then darted back to the screen when he'd answered her with a small smile. She tightened her grip on his hand.

When Ami finally pulled away from the monitor she turned to face the couple with the brightest smile either of them had ever seen her give.

"It's a girl, isn't it?" Minako beamed. "I knew it," she said as she looked at Cairo again, her expression a combination of smugness and elation, "I knew it. Pay up."

Cairo almost seemed worried. "A... girl..." His grey eyes were clouded over in thought as his eyebrows furrowed. Boys were easy to handle. Play sports, have a few meaningful discussions about the world and women and they could pretty much get on with the rest themselves, but a girl... of course, she would _also_ play sports and have meaningful discussions with him about the world… but other images flashed through his brain. Horrifying ones... of beating back hordes of horny men with baseball bats and golf clubs, of doing feminine hygiene product runs, of attempting to navigate through minefield after minefield of complex emotions, endless rants about fashion models and training bras and shopping for shoes, not to mention all of the crying... It downright terrified him. "A girl..." How was he going to cope with a girl?

And then he looked down into Minako's plump, glowing face. She was beautiful, even with swollen ankles, weird cravings and hormonal weeping. She was a miracle, she was the strongest person he's ever known, and he knew that no matter what, as long as she was with him, he could have a hundred girls and he would be fine. They would do it together... and of course, he had back up. The reassurance relaxed him significantly - this was not a Shitennou duty, he did not mind making mistakes, especially since he knew that there would always be someone there who could fix a problem he could not - the child would have nine aunts, three of which already had experience raising a child; two grandmothers; two grandfathers; and four uncles. "This is one bet that I don't mind losing." He reached into his pocket with his free hand and pulled out a banknote, handing it to her while he kissed her soft palm. Finally, after so very long Minako and Cairo - the Senshi of Venus and the Kunzite of Elysian - could really have something of themselves, for themselves. They were going to have a baby girl.

"I wouldn't say that just yet." Ami's smile had not moved from her pretty features.

Both Minako's and Cairo's faces shot up and stared at Ami with confusion.

"It's a boy?" Cairo asked, hope, unavoidable hope, sneaking into his voice.

Ami's smile never wavered. "It's both," she said.

For one terrible moment Minako was filled with horror. "It's a hermaphrodite?!"

Ami placed her forehead into her hand with exasperation. "It's twins, Minako. _Twins_," she said, unable to understand how someone who'd once led entire armies into battle could truly be such a loveable ditz.

All colour drained from Cairo's face.

Minako was laughing so hard she began to cry.

* * *

Makoto was too distraught to even bother hiding her tears, clutching onto Napoleon as if her very life depended on it. He in turn held her tightly, shushing her with soft sounds and stroking her hair, hoping it would help her pain, but to no avail. "Mortal..." she whispered, "they're mortal."

Usagi had glassy eyes and was looking down, as if she were somehow ashamed.

Mamoru rose from his seat, letting go of his wife's hand to make his way over to his head Shitennou. He stared into Cairo's eyes, "I'm so sorry," he said firmly, genuinely. "I wish there was something I could do."

"There's still a chance-" Usagi started, her unwavering optimism rearing its ugly head, "Just because they won't have super powers doesn't mean that they'll..." she trailed off, unable to bring herself to say the words. "Maybe the Crystal will grant them a longer life! I mean, we're not exactly going to live forever either, right? We're not _really_ immortal. We don't know how long they're going to live for, they're just babies! Maybe they'll live for hundreds and hundreds of years!" Her gaze was flittering between Ami, Zephyr, Rei and Napoleon, hoping that one of them, any of them, scientist or seer, would pipe up and back her theory. She avoided looking at either Minako or Cairo at all costs, each of them clutching a swaddle of cloth, sleeping bundles - one of blue and one of pink. Cairo's face was too hard and impassive for Usagi to feel comfortable with. When his features set themselves in that certain way she was almost afraid of him, as if he were some horrible statue of stone. But as frightened of Cairo as she was, her fear for Minako's well-being was tenfold. The blonde, so usually full of expression - whether happiness, giddiness or resolute determination - was as closed off as her husband. Usagi had no clue as to what Minako was thinking and she hated it as much as she hated thunderstorms.

"Usagi, even if they did, they will not have the same strength and protection that we do, there's-" Zephyr hesitated to say it in front of the new parents. Cairo's eyes flicked onto his green ones, forcing him to continue what he'd started, pulling the full truth reluctantly out of him. "There's no certainty that they will survive the Freeze when it arrives. They're just as likely to die as everyone else on the planet."

"A five percent chance," Cairo's voice was grave, uncracked and solid, the complete opposite of the raging fear within him. He glared at Ami. "That's what you said, isn't it? One in twenty will survive the Freeze."

Makoto's muffled sobs increased in volume and Napoleon closed his arms around her tighter.

Jacinto sighed heavily. "Look, this disaster isn't going to happen for a while, a century or two at least, we've established that."

"It could be less," Ami warned, interrupting him. "I said m- my figures… they were estimates."

"Then it could be more too, right?" Jacinto looked at her seriously for confirmation, making deliberate eye contact with her. "Right?" he asked again. Usually so calm in stressful situations, the most cool-headed of all the Senshi, she was beside herself with panic. Jacinto could feel the fear gripping her like a demon on a soul.

She nodded, unable to do more.

"Right, so we have a while," Jacinto continued, going back to his pep talk. "Just because these children are going to have normal lives doesn't mean they can't be happy ones. It doesn't mean that Airi and Owain won't grow up being loved and adored by their mom and dad, and treated like the damn royalty they are by their aunts and uncles. We knew we were going to lose loved ones, the Freeze isn't something which was ever going to catch us by surprise. We all have family we're going to lose, Napoleon has a brother, my niece and neph-" he stopped suddenly at Rei's surprising and discreet touch to his arm, and noticed her lilac eyes flit over to Usagi, who was looking as if she were to blame for everything.

"I am sorry for all of those other people, Jacinto, but the Freeze cannot get these children." Minako's voice was as cold as her icy blue eyes. At that moment it was plain to see that she did not care about Jacinto's family, or Napoleon's or anyone else's for that matter. She was a mother now, she had become more selfish. There was Usagi and there were her children to keep safe, everyone else would be regrettable collateral damage. "It will not," she stated with finality.

Minako didn't see it, but Cairo looked over to her, and his eyes hardened to granite in the face of her statement of certainty. There was something changing in him, Usagi felt it as plain as day, she didn't need Jacinto's power to tell her.

She didn't know what it was, she didn't know what would happen, but it made her incredibly sad.

They were meant to have a palace full of children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. Chibi-Usa was supposed to have an innumerable amount of brothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews... in Usagi's mind the Crystal Palace wasn't going to be a palace at all. She'd planned that it would be like a big community centre, full of vibrancy and families, Minako's and Cairo's brood being completely indistinguishable from Rei's and Jacinto's or Mako's and Leo's or Ami's and Danny's. She'd laughed about it to herself in her dreams: they wouldn't be a monarchy, they were going to be a big bunch of magical hippies. That's what she had wanted. Happy friends and laughing voices echoing through the crystalline walls.

How very silly of her. How ridiculously childish. That was not how the world worked.

She began to cry too.

* * *

His eyes shot open on instinct, his senses having picked up the other conscious person in the room. He could feel her standing close by and not sleeping warmly next to him. He sighed, rubbed at his eyes briefly and then checked his phone for the time on the bedside table. It was too early in the morning to be awake, barely past midnight. The twins wouldn't wake for a good four hours to feed - that was one mercy they provided their parents, they ate like clockwork. Minako had joked they'd probably gotten their impeccable timekeeping from him.

He rose from the bed and padded softly to her lithe form, deceptively small as she leaned over the wooden crib at the foot of the bed. Wrapping his arms around her, he settled the back of her blonde head in the crook of his neck. "Can't sleep?" he asked quietly, looking over his wife to the objects of her scrutiny: the two tiny sleeping babies, nestled together below in a prison of crib bumpers, rail covers and Sesame Street themed mobiles.

He could feel the tension coursing through Minako's body, her muscles taut and awkward, and for a moment she didn't quite fit into his arms. "Relax," he whispered into her hair, "they're still breathing, they're still here. Nothing is going to happen to them. Not on my watch."

There was a sharp intake of breath and then her whole body fell into place, but she felt heavy, as if it was more a sense of resignation than relief. "I saw an article today in a magazine," she mumbled, her voice tired, "about Hair Tourniquet Syndrome." She could feel his chin roll lightly on her crown, an indication that he had tilted his head to look at her. Mirroring his action she lifted her eyes to meet his, the moonlight illuminating them in the gloom. "Adult hair is surprisingly strong, apparently it can wrap around their fingers and toes, cutting the skin and causing severe swelling and blisters. It's agonising, it can even lead to amputation." She could tell he had lifted his eyebrows and she sighed, turning back to stare at Airi and Owain.

"You're checking to see if they have hair in between their toes?" There was a hint of worry in his voice. "They're not in pain, Minako, they're absolutely fine. You should get some rest. You need it."

She shook her head and he could feel the shift on his collar bone. "That's not why I'm awake, I couldn't give a damn about Hair Tourniquet Syndrome." Her voice didn't shake, there were no tears, but Cairo could feel the nerves, the agitation. "I'm not afraid of accidentally dropping them, I'm not worried about colic, or cot death, or meningitis or choking. I don't spend all night awake debating the pros and cons of whether they should get the MMR vaccination. All I keep thinking about is-" she couldn't continue her voice cracking. Still, the tears would not come.

"It'll be alright," he said, his tone definite as his fingers slid over her bare arms with reassurance.

She didn't notice any of it. "Cairo, I should be terrified about those things. I should be standing here checking their toes for hair." She sounded like she was in disbelief, "Instead, all I can do is think about when they're older and the world kills them as if they're nothing but forgettable extras in some cheesy disaster film." She stretched out her arm, her hand open wide as if to touch them, but she pulled away, fearing she would wake them. "What's the point in worrying about those things? When no matter what we do to protect them they're going to die anyway?" Cairo swallowed heavily, a sign that what she'd said had struck a nerve, although she wouldn't have been able to tell if she hadn't felt it through his skin, her back pressed to his chest. He was so good at hiding himself away, of taking all of his fears and tucking them deep into a spot where they could never be seen by others, just so he could keep moving forward. She wished she had that talent. "I just... I feel so helpless. I'm letting them down." She did touch them then, unable to resist, her fingers gently caressing the soft pale down of her son's hair before shifting to trace their way along her daughter's tiny bud of a nose. She couldn't help the smile from spreading across her face and it was all she could do to stop herself from picking them up and holding them close.

"You're a great mother, Minako." She didn't need to hear about how all people died eventually, that it was a childish fancy to wish for immortality, that everyone else had babies and raised them knowing they would one day perish, and sometimes not in the best of ways. But for Minako this was as close as she could come to panic, she needed to be soothed, that was all. She may not have thought she had anything in common with regular new mothers, but in essence, she was exactly the same, she worried just like them, it was just unfortunate that her fears were founded and brutal. His plan of action came quickly, in the morning he would call Ami and ask her to have a talk with Minako about new mothers and anxiety, Mamoru had told him about that. It wasn't much, but it was something. For now though, all she needed was for him to be there for her, to support her, like she did for Usagi and the others, and him. "Our children are luckiest things alive to have you." He'd chosen his words deliberately. A subtle reminder that for now they lived and were happy, blissfully ignorant of the dangers their world posed.

Minako sighed and turned to face her husband. "What mother spends all her time wishing her children had never been born?"

Cairo looked away from her to the crib, that familiar look of determination creeping onto his face: a small frown and a hardening of his eyes. _The ones who are afraid_.

The Freeze would not get their children. He would not let Minako down.

* * *

He was deep into a report analysis when an annoyed huff pull away his attention. He looked up through the dull, yellow light of his desk lamp to find his wife dressed elegantly in a simple forest green dress, her lips a siren red, the colours evidently chosen to suit the time of year. She was leaning against the doorframe, her arms crossed in an obvious show of displeasure.

"I can't, not tonight. Let them know that I'll make it up to them," he said simply and went back to his reading.

"Not good enough," she stated firmly.

He looked up again and lifted his eyebrows as if he were somehow disappointed with her answer. "There's a lot of work I need to do, if I could make it, I would."

She uncrossed her arms and strode into the office, snatching the piece of paper from his hands to read it. He sat back in his chair, as if he were letting a child misbehave in order to berate them for it once they were done. It infuriated her. Her ire was only aggravated by the contents of the report. She threw the sheet back at him, her sky coloured eyes blazing like a storm. "You're missing your children's first Christmas play to read about a few crazy monks prophesying about the end of the world?"

"Rei sent it herself. Their predictions appear to be quite accurate."

"_Rei_ is coming to the play!"

"Good for her." Cairo sighed, frustrated that Minako didn't seem to understand. It was not as if he wanted to miss Airi and Owain singing their hearts out to 'When Santa Got Stuck Up the Chimney', but if missing a few cute moments meant finding a way to stop the Freeze without having to seal everything in raw, uncontainable power and killing most of the world's population at the same time, then it was a sacrifice he had to make. This was not something they could play around with, the Earth was changing, already it could be seen. If Makoto's investigations truly indicated what they appeared to be showing, then time was running out. Using the Crystal would have severe consequences, not just for ordinary people but for the existence of the Earth itself. Whether through its own natural process or through Usagi's magic, the planet would become inhospitable. They had realised that in order for the Crystal to save the world, they would have to essentially kill it first and then rebuild it, as the other planets had been during the beginning of the Silver Millennium. It was the oldest form of magic and by the end of it Usagi's power would reign supreme, with the fate of the Earth depending on her and the Ginzuishou, and taking guardianship away from Mamoru. That last part didn't scare him nearly so much as it once would have - it was no longer about who controlled the Moon and the Earth - it was about saving what they could. So many people were going to die, his children along with them. He needed to find a way to safeguard their future. "I have to read this report."

"Cairo, it's not like we don't know it's coming, what's so new about what these monks are saying?"

"They think it'll happen in the next century, we could have more time."

Minako's lips pressed themselves into a firm line. "More time for what? Owain and Airi aren't going to get a longer childhood just because the world might try and explode a little later than scheduled. You can spare an hour."

"I can't."

"Cut the bullshit!" she yelled. "You know damn well why you refuse to come and it's cowardly!"

He stood up at that, slowly, deliberately, his knuckles pressing on the table and supporting him as he leaned forward. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

Minako boldly went on. "You don't want to go! You don't want to make these kinds of memories because you don't want the pain of remembering when they're gone."

Cairo stood back from the desk and frowned, like he was listening to nonsense. "Don't be ridiculous." He sat himself back down and began reading the report.

"You're going to miss these things later on, whether it's by the Freeze or from age-" she swallowed down the heavy lump which built in her throat at the thought, forcing the tears back from her stinging eyes "-your memories will be all you'll have left of them."

He looked up at that, furious that she was upsetting herself and even more angry at her implication. "Minako, I am not trying to avoid my children. Everything I do, I do for them. None of us has taken a break since they were born. Usagi spends fourteen hours a day locked in the lab with Ami and Danny trying to figure out how to control that fucking Crystal! Napoleon and Jacinto spend every waking minute struggling to fund this operation, Makoto's all but been banished to places where rats and cockroaches have problems surviving and Mamoru has not had the opportunity to return to his corporeal form since he travelled into Elysion two years ago! I barely sleep, this work is my life. What more can I do?"

Minako was unfazed by his rare and aggressive outburst. "You can stop trying to save them from the inevitable." She shook her head in disappoint. "They're mortal and they're flying through their lives so very fast, appreciate what time they have left."

"In case you need reminding, Minako, over six billion people are going to die as well."

"Owain and Airi will be the only ones you'll regret losing." With that she stalked out of his den.

He sat back defeated, wondering when and how his and Minako's views had swapped so dramatically. She had apparently accepted that they were going to lose their children; Cairo wasn't sure it was something to be happy about. It changed nothing. He'd made a promise to himself that he would protect them, that he would keep his family safe from the Freeze. Minako may have given up, but he most certainly would not.

But that didn't mean that she didn't have a valid point.

Cairo sighed, rubbing his face with his hands and then tossing the paper back onto the central mound of documents cluttering his desk. He stood and grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair. "Minako," he called out as he made his way out, switching off the small lamp as he went, "wait. I'm coming with you."

* * *

Minako's eyebrows lifted and a playful smile graced her face as she eyed her husband's usually steady hands. He was dressed impeccably, as always, the silver tie highlighting the colour of his stern eyes, but Cairo seemed incapable of adjusting the knot correctly. He was frowning at himself in the mirror, as if his disapproval could somehow convince the tie to fix itself.

"Let me," Minako offered as she made her way towards him, the dupioni silk of her champagne dress rustling ever so softly as she moved.

"It's alright," he practically growled out, his frustration aimed at the long piece of cloth draped around his neck.

She gave him a warm smile, and, ignoring his denial, she shrugged off her gold lace bolero jacket so as not to wrinkle it while she worked. As she gently pried his hands away and began to undo his tie, she noticed that his frown softened as he stared beyond her to their reflection. "Are you checking me out?" she asked, knowing the answer.

He looked down to meet her eyes, his gaze practically having to tearing itself away from the view in the mirror. "It's a beautiful dress."

She flipped the tie over, the soft material fanning its way across their vision for a split moment. "I know," she said, leaning in closer, "that's why I chose it."

"Everyone will be watching you."

"Everyone will be watching the Airi," she corrected. "Besides, I'm an old woman, it would be kind of gross for people to be staring at the mother of the bride when we have a wedding full of hot, young blood."

"You're not old," he stated, unwilling to let her divulge in the fantasy, "you don't look a day over twenty eight," and you never will... he didn't have the heart to say the last part, not right then, not on what was meant to be one of their happiest days, a celebration of their daughter's new life.

It was not as if she didn't know anyway. She stood back, disguising the move as if she were admiring her handiwork, and did her best to keep her voice level. "As long as I still have you staring, then it's all I'll ever need."

She moved towards him again when he seemed to struggle with adjusting the white rose into the buttonhole of his lapel. Smiling as she plucked the flower from his hands she asked, "Were you like this for our wedding?"

His answer was simple and immediate, although not without affection. "No."

She could feel his breath on her forehead, the soft air caressing the bridge of her nose. "Were you worse?" she teased.

He lifted his arms and cupped her hands into his larger ones, sliding the pad of his thumb over the light sheen of her nails as he pulled her fingers away from his jacket. "You're the other half of me, Minako, without you I'd never be whole." His eyes held her firmly in place, his rare speech of open affection stilling her like a spell. The emotion of the day was getting to him, he knew it, but at that moment his pride in her and his gratitude for her love kept him talking. "I had made the mistake of not choosing you before. I was alone with only my responsibility to Endymion and it made me a bitter, cold man. I wasn't going to make that mistake in this life." He pulled out a chain from his pocket then, a golden, heart-shaped locket dangling from the end. "You don't have to put it on now, I know this ensemble you're wearing took weeks to plan, but I thought it would be something you'd like to have." He placed the gift into her hands and basked in the glow of her grateful smile when she opened it.

"You know me better than anyone else," she said.

"When I find myself losing my way you always bring me back, you keep me strong. The day I married you there was nothing for me to be afraid of."

"I felt the very same thing," she whispered. "If it wasn't going to ruin my make up I'd kiss you."

Cairo's eyes scanned her, sliding over her face, along the curve of her neck and downwards, a small smile slipping onto his lips. "The reception ends at nine to tonight and I'm not meeting Mamoru until eleven thirty tomorrow morning," his voice was low, his suggestion heavy.

"Dad, please!" Owain had popped his blond head through the door and was looking at his parents with a face of mild disgust. "That's my mother you're trying to-" he stopped himself from continuing at the look he received from his father. "You're right, I don't even want to finish that sentence. You're both in your fifties, you're too old to make more babies."

Cairo glared at his son as Minako continued to fiddle with the final details of his suit. "Apparently you're at the right age," he commented, somewhat irately.

Owain's blue eyes narrowed into a carbon copy of his father's glare. "Dad..." he started, his voice edged with warning.

"You barely know this girl." It was a point he'd made several times before in the past few months, and Cairo had no qualms about raising it again. "She could be lying to you, there's no proof this child is yours. It's ridiculous that you won't even consider a DNA test."

Owain rolled his eyes. "She doesn't care about our money, she loves me and I'm not shirking away from my responsibilities."

"Twenty three is too young to be a father." Cairo wanted to tell him so badly. _Live, go out and have fun, forget about responsibility and duty and just enjoy your life. Don't have children, my son, because it's not going to last_. He sighed, knowing that he had to calm himself, it would not do to be a wallowing mess, too many people would take advantage of it, and it was certainly not something he wanted his son, or worse, the groom to see. Cairo had an image to uphold, especially to the man who had the audacity to marry his daughter.

"Airi is getting married today, in case you'd forgotten she's the same age as me. Why am I too young and she isn't? That's sexist."

"Airi is different. She's been with Peter since they were sixteen," Minako interrupted to prevent an argument from starting. "Enough now from the both of you. I need to go make sure your aunts aren't driving your sister insane, Usagi had been saying something about hairpins and YouTube earlier." Both men smiled at the predictable torture Airi was most likely receiving at that very moment. "You can walk me to her room, your father needs some time alone," Minako announced.

With a grateful smile Cairo gave her a peck on her cheek, watching as she gracefully put on her bolero and then took their son's arm. It could not be more obvious that Owain was Minako's son, he had a fierce and extrovert passion for life, and a sense of duty as strong as his mother's. While Airi was also the splitting image of her mother, she took on more of Cairo's temperament - calm, loyal and closed.

"I haven't seen that look in a long time." This time it was Mamoru who had interrupted his internal musing, the dark haired man's piercing gaze reflecting a hint of amusement. "Nervous?"

Cairo's wasn't afraid to admit that he was. "Very. I don't trust him."

Mamoru's smile grew. "Then trust Airi. She's a good judge of character, Peter's a decent guy."

"I don't seem to have much of a choice in the matter, you should remember that for when Chibi-Usa comes along. Fathers get no say." Cairo was fidgeting with his cuff links and did not notice the sudden dip in Mamoru's mood, or the guilt-ridden drop of his eyes. "I want this to be perfect for her," he continued, being unusually open about his fears, "she deserves to be happy."

"It will be perfect." Mamoru tried to think of something inspirational to say, like Cairo could do so effortlessly for him whenever he needed a boost of confidence or spirit. "You'll be her rock when you walk her down the isle," he managed to get out, and then moved on when he realised how silly it sounded. "For now though," he said, tilting his head at the door, "you're needed outside. Danny's drunk a little too much and is being less than discreet with one of Peter's attractive relatives in the rose garden."

Cairo's eyes suddenly grew cold and Mamoru knew he'd made a mistake in telling him. He had hoped it would provoke some form of mild exasperation and provide a good opportunity to distract his friend, but it seemed that he'd miscalculated. With so much hanging over Mamoru's head, and with Cairo being so blatantly outside of his comfort zone, it was hard to judge what the right thing to do and say was.

"It's my daughter's wedding," he stated.

Mamoru could see he was angry. "Danny has always had trouble keeping it in his pants," he said, trying to lighten the mood. "If we go divert his attention now no one will notice. I have Jacinto on distraction duty at the moment, but Ami's not going to be outsmarted by him for very long, she'll see through it and start looking for Danny soon." He made to leave but Cairo refused to move. "Let's go sort it out."

"Mamoru, what is going on?" His voice was bold, as if he was demanding an answer rather than asking a question.

Mamoru swallowed, there were few people in the world who could make him feel like a fearful child. "What do you mean?"

"Danny doesn't do things like this unless he's upset. You said you wanted to see me tomorrow." The pieces were falling together. "What is going on?" he repeated.

"Nothing-"

"What do you know?" Cairo took in a deep breath, unwilling to let it go. He could not wait. Not for this. Not when he knew what was coming. "Please, tell me."

Mamoru let out a resigned sigh, his body suddenly becoming very tired. He gave up the pretence and indicated for his friend to take a seat. That day or the next, it didn't matter really when Cairo would be told, the memory of his daughter's wedding would be tainted either way with an inescapable bitterness. He'd just hoped to prolong his friend's happiness for that little while longer, but it seemed that such graces were not to be given. He struggled at first to say anything, but Cairo, ever patient, waited unmoving until Mamoru could find the right words.

"We've lost," he said eventually. "It's over."

* * *

Cairo was numb as he took Airi's steady hand. He gave her his best smile and he stood as solidly as he had always done. He was the father she needed him to be, the man she loved with all her innocent and youthful heart. He had stared at her with eyes apparently full of wonder and love and told her she was the most beautiful woman the world had ever seen, but as he walked with her along the isle, nodding briefly at a few important guests, inside he felt nothing.

Elysion had finally collapsed under the struggle of trying to save an Earth that was apparently not sick. Mamoru had explained what Cairo already knew, that the Golden Crystal was for healing, but the planet was simply evolving from one state to another, aging with time, so there was nothing for it to mend. They had exhausted all options. There was nothing more for them to do, Mamoru had spent more time in Elysion as a researcher than he'd ever spent there as a King, searching and experimenting and praying for hope. It was all up to Usagi now, and the raw, destructive power of the Ginzouishou.

Mamoru had only hesitated for a second before hitting Cairo with a second blow, but each word had to be pulled from his lips with reluctance and regret once he started.

Cairo's children would stay mortal, there was nothing that could be done; when the Freeze came, unlike the Senshi, his children and any of their descendants would most likely perish. Ami had been trying to recreate the Senshi's and Shitennou's powers with the help of both Crystals for decades in the hope of extending their protection to the rest of the world's population, a vaccine of sorts, to impending doom. She had not found a solution, but she had found an answer. The Senshi and Shitennou had inherited their abilities from the Silver Millennium, gifts which had been given in a lost time, gifts which only remained with them because of the sacrifice made by Princess Serenity's mother. To even hope to replicate such power would require Usagi to share her mother's fate, something beyond imagining for any of them.

They had truly lost, it seemed.

And he would have to tell Minako.

He kissed his daughter farewell at the alter, her happy tears leaving him unmoved, and handed her over to death.

* * *

The end of the world came much sooner than they had planned. Owain's son had only become a year old the week before, Airi had just been promoted at work and hadn't yet finished moving into the semi-detached house she had purchased with her husband Peter.

Perhaps it was a blessing that they were all together in the end. The Senshi stood with the Shitennou, dressed in uniform for the first time in years, while people ran around screaming in fear and panic and despair. On sight of the warriors many stopped and began to pray to them, begging Usagi for salvation and safety. They wanted their homes and families back, they pleaded for life and Heaven to the fourteen men and women gifted with powers beyond imagination, but all Usagi could do was cry with them while her guardians tried as best they could to hold back the tides of destruction.

The ground below them cracked open, down deep to the mantle, swallowing people and structures and the flooding salt waters of the furious oceans. Fires burned and melted and ate away civilisation; cliffs and sinkholes formed in seconds while mountains crumbled in the blink of an eye.

It had been Uranus who first tried to make Usagi see reason. Only the guardian of the Ginzouishou could awaken the true power of Sailor Saturn and end the world. It was up to the Moon Princess to save them.

But Usagi looked over to Minako, who was too busy clutching her grandson and crying with her daughter over the body of Peter to think of the destruction around them, and Usagi could not do it. She could not be the one to kill Minako's children, she could not bring herself to sentence them to death with her own lips.

Ami and Jacinto tried, even Mamoru took her by the shoulders and shook the little blonde woman, as small as a child, and begged her to do it, to save those they could before they all perished.

But still Usagi looked over to Minako and couldn't, she stared into Owain's terrified face as he searched between his mother and father for the answer. She fell to her knees, hail stones of fire and ice raining down around them, and she begged through tears not to be forced to do it, to not be a murderer of innocents. They had been trying for years to think of something, there had to be another option.

Finally it was Cairo who tilted up the Princess' chin. It was Cairo, ignoring his son's eyes and his grandson's wailing, who gave her the permission she so desperately needed, and the forgiveness she craved. He clutched at her shoulders, looking her in her light eyes and told her the truth. _Do it now,_ he had said, _or you'll be responsible for the end of all humanity. Save Earth._

Sailor Saturn brought forth her true and terrible power, and then Usagi enveloped the world in pristine crystal.

* * *

When Minako woke, it was to silence, and a shining world of giant, jagged crystals. She felt a weight on her chest and looked down to find her sleeping grandson curled on her, his hair just as chocolatey as she remembered it, his little outfit the very same: a dark blue sweater with animal prints, a red collared shirt underneath. She breathed a deep sigh of relief, her lungs heaving out a stale and painful breath of air.

The baby disintegrated into a fine, shining dust.

* * *

As Minako stumbled away from the car wreck, her lip, cheek and forearms bloodied from the impact, she felt numb, for the first time since she'd awoken in Crystal Tokyo there was no pain, no sorrow, only nothingness. It was better than alcohol, it was better than drugs, it was better even than sex. All she had to do was hold onto the numbness and it would be alright.

The rain began to fall, a low rumble overhead signalling the impending storm. Already the flashing colour of the emergency services could be seen making their way over to her, but she didn't care, she didn't feel, she was going to be fine. Then she looked down to her hand, to the gentle weight of the golden locket, the sweet images of her family - her baby girl with Cairo and herself holding Owain - and then the numbness fell away to the bitter sharpness of pain.

She wept, wondering what it was all for.


	4. American Honey

She grew up on a side of the road  
Where the church bells ring and strong love grows  
She grew up good, she grew up slow  
Like American honey

Steady as a preacher, free as a weed  
Couldn't wait to get goin'  
But wasn't quite ready to leave  
So innocent, pure and sweet  
Like American honey

There's a wild, wild whisper blowing in the wind  
Calling out my name like a long lost friend  
Oh I miss those days as the years go by  
Oh nothing's sweeter than summer time  
And American honey

Get caught in the race, of this crazy life  
Trying to be everything can make you lose your mind

I just wanna go back in time  
To American honey, yea

There's a wild, wild whisper blowing in the wind  
Calling out my name like a long lost friend  
Oh I miss those days as the years go by  
Oh nothing's sweeter than summer time  
And American honey

Gone for so long now  
I gotta get back to her somehow  
To American honey

There's a wild, wild whisper blowing in the wind  
Calling out my name like a long lost friend  
Oh I miss those days as the years go by  
Oh nothin's sweeter than summer time  
And American honey  
And American honey

* * *

Work Text:

She leaned her head into his shoulder, nuzzling him to get comfortable in her new resting spot and then adjusting slightly so her earring didn't press painfully into the soft tissue behind her jaw. His large arm, always so firm and strong, wrapped around her waist and pulled her in closer to his side. "Death is the mother of beauty," he said out loud. His voice was naturally deep and with her head so close to his throat she could feel the reverberations rolling from up his chest through to his mouth.

She needed no explanation as they sat together on the smooth, crystalline floor, leaning their backs against the foot of the bed and staring out of the window which made up the entire outer wall of their quarters. The sun was setting, for its very final time, and it was blazing in a shimmering orange hue. It was drenching the world in the intensity of its colour, tinting everyone and everything in a warm palette. Anything clear or bright sparkled gold: windows, the reflective walls of the crystalline buildings, the street bots who patrolled and cleaned the city… but anything of colour was tinted: the greens of the foliage which lined the city streets and decorated parks were muted into deep purples and browns, the hoveroads - already semi-opaque layers of charcoal grey glass stacked on top of one another - were practically black. "Who said that?" she inquired, idly curious.

He shrugged the shoulder unencumbered by the weight of her head. "Some poet, from back in the day, I suppose." That could have meant any time period between a decade ago and the last three hundred thousand years - even from before the formation of Crystal Tokyo, let alone Crystal Earth - but Nephrite was almost always vague when it came to trivial points. It was difficult enough for him to keep track of what was part of the present and what was the near future without mixing up the past as well. It was a wonder that neither he nor Rei had gone stark raving mad considering the sheer number of séances, divination sessions and meditation trances they had performed during their excessively long lives.

"Do you think this will make people less afraid?" There were no vehicles floating along the roads that evening; all were parked in the correct zones, even though their owners had abandoned them forever. It amazed her, in spite of it being the end of the world, people had been orderly when they stopped living their daily routines and sought out those they wanted to spend their final moments alive with. This was exactly what the world was supposed to have become, what the Senshi had strived to achieve from the moment they had seen their Crystal Tokyo future, but despite all of their successes, no matter how far they had evolved into the utopian vision Serenity had dreamt up, it clearly had not been nearly enough. The Earth, it seemed, was intent on making this point. It was reminding humanity that with all its unpredictability, violence and despair, chaos was even more powerful than the tranquillity and harmony man had achieved. Serenity may have won the battle, but in a few tiny hours, she was going to lose the war.

"I doubt there's anyone who'll manage to forget their impending annihilation because of an impressive sunset, but there is something calming about it. You have to admire our Earth, it's a fitting way to go: a brief scintillation in orange and gold before lights out. She's going out in a blaze of glory."

Makoto smiled at his use of woefully outdated sayings. They were rare since the Senshi and Shitennou tended to pick up and adapt their language and accents based on current trends, but every so often Nephrite would revert to older versions, preferring the feel of them on his tongue. "I wouldn't give Earth all of the credit," she replied, "technically this is the Sun's doing." Their star was dying and there was nothing to be done, a seemingly innocuous meteor had apparently travelled a little too close one day and had found itself pulled into the Sun's gravitational field; it was absorbed quickly enough, but that was where the trouble had begun. Scientists of all kinds had hypothesised that there must have been an unprecedentedly powerful element or alloy or something which initiated the chain reaction - Makoto hadn't really understood the complicated hypothesis put forward by Zoisite (despite her years at study, and being a foremost expert in biochemistry, irritatingly, Zoisite's scientific mind still left hers trailing in its wake), but all that she had really needed to know was that what should have taken billions of years to happen was only going to take a few thousand. And now that time had come. In less than a few hours the Sun was going to unleash the apocalypse, completely engulfing the Solar System in a supernova explosion before shrinking itself into a black hole. Space travel had not evolved far enough to avoid the devastating reach of the blast or its ensuing gravitational pull, so quite simply there was nowhere to go, no place to run. Even the mighty Twin Crystals of Gold and Silver were useless.

"I'd like to think that the Earth has some input in how she dies. It's been a rather magnificent planet." Nephrite had always been more art than science, more easily susceptible to the whimsical than to cold, hard facts. It was a trait she shared with him; it was why they got along so very well. Unable to resist, Makoto intertwined her long fingers into those on his much larger hand. He took in a deep breath, and after so many years she knew it was not done because he loved the smell of her hair, but because of the intimacy of doing so. Her response, however – an intake of breath of her own - was purely to catch the deep, earthy undertones of the spice he wore, and had always worn. Nephrite smelt a little like a forest in autumn, it reminded her of an old tree and comforting tisanes, pine and cinnamon and a hint of clove, of earth and maple leaves sodden in morning dew. How he had managed to maintain the scent in the tens of thousands of years they had been alive, she never knew. If she had to guess, he had probably asked Zoisite or Ami to replicate his cologne, although that one scent was not complex enough to be responsible for what she could sense and feel and smell when she breathed him in. It wasn't his de-odorizer or clothing sanitizer or soap, she was his wife, she knew when those things changed and how often they did... It was so strange that no matter what, he always smelt the same to her. She'd never actually asked him how it was possible; she'd never wanted him to unveil the mystery.

"I pity them," she said. "They must be terrified." Like her fellow soldiers, Makoto had had time to accept the news that their lives now had a deadline; she had faced death more times than she cared to remember and it had long lost its ability to frighten her, but for those who had not been privileged enough to have survived for hundreds of millennia, she could only imagine the fear they were facing. Humanity as a whole had had thousands of years to prepare, but true to their nature, they had fought against it at first, desperately seeking solutions that did not exist and then, for a while, acting as if the apocalypse would never come. Many had not even believed the truth of it, after a few hundred years it had been easy for them to dismiss their impending doom as ridiculous predictions of the supposedly-prophetic. Unfortunately, as more time had passed and the Sun darkened and swelled, their little bubbles of denial began to burst and they turned to Serenity, treating her like a living god and begging her for a salvation she could not give. It was only in their very last moments that they finally accepted their fate.

Makoto sighed. The life cycles of earthly creatures were so inconsequentially short to the Senshi and Shitennou, but she did her very best to never lose sight of their value, every human, every mammal, even the insects which seemed to last no longer than a blink of her eyes held a place in her heart. They grew, they evolved, they died. They were the children she never had, and now they were about to be snuffed out by the very thing which had given them life in the first place. It hardly seemed fair. "Do you have any regrets?" she asked him, always the one to prompt conversation in silences.

He pushed her away slightly, a gentle movement which made her look up at him, to meet his eyes. "More than anything on this Earth, I would have given you children if I could have."

Her heart swelled at the selflessness of his answer. She lifted her hand, long fingers and pristinely polished pearl nails cupping his rough face. He had grown a dark beard for the past few years which he barely kept from becoming unruly, figuring shaving would have been a waste of time. He had nick-named it his 'apocalypse beard', offending Ami at the insensitivity of it (which meant that naturally, he'd bring it up at any opportunity). "I know you would have," she replied.

Except for a small phase when he had first realised that the true consequences of being a Shitennou included never being a father, Nephrite had not really had any desire to sire offspring. He was a ridiculously practical man, sometimes to the point where people believed him cold, arrogant, even uncaring, but he was the very opposite to those criticisms. What people misinterpreted was his ability to avoid worrying about things which were beyond his control, a result, most likely, of his powers as a star-seer which had forced him, time and again, to accept destiny's plans without any say in the matter. For Nephrite, when a door was shut permanently in his face, he gave himself a very small amount of time to sulk and then he moved on and never thought about it again - where the other Shitennou had spent an inordinate amount of time drowning themselves in the guilt of their past crimes, Nephrite had accepted Endymion's forgiveness and promptly started chasing after Makoto. There had only been one exception to this aspect of his personality, and that was his desire to provide his wife with the things she had wanted most but could never hope to have had, her biggest wish, of course, being children of her own.

To keep their moods from creeping towards a path he didn't want to follow, he dismissed their topic of discussion. "There's little point in talking about regrets now since it's a little too late to do anything about it."

"It's still not too late to fix the bedside table, or the e-shelf, or the puriphore in the temp-pipe in the cleanse-room."

He laughed, hearty and loud, at the list of things he had promised to repair in their quarters but had never gotten round to doing. "Really? You want me to do those things now? I can think of infinitely better ways for us to spend our final moments."

The underlying suggestion was not lost on her, but she was having none of it. She sat up straight and raised an eyebrow. "Yes I do. You're the one who insisted that you'd do it yourself instead of calling in the maintenance staff."

He stopped finding it funny when he noticed that her full lips were not smiling with him. "You're serious?" Her lack of response confirmed it. "Makoto, we're going to die in," he flicked his gaze down to the bottom left, activating his e-neuromitter and drawing up a quick image of the time across his eyes, "less than five hours and you want me to use up these last, precious moments repairing an e-shelf?"

"Don't be silly," she leaned up suddenly and kissed him, catching his mouth with hers and pressing him into the foot of the bed, "it shouldn't take you nearly that long to get it all done," she said when she pulled away.

"Your need for orderliness borders on obsession, woman," he said, pulling her back to him and kissing her again. "You understand that there will be no tomorrow and no one to care about the fact that the books are not sitting on a perfectly level surface?"

"Indulge me," she asked, moving so that she sat astride him, "I like watching you fix things. It reminds me of… before."

He grunted, partly with lust but mostly with irritation. "You don't play fair."

She poked him in the chest. "I didn't say a damn word when you and the other Shitennou disappeared off with Endymion for that five-year 'exploratory natural science trip of the inner planets' last decade."

He frowned. "So?"

Her mouth tightened. "Don't pretend you men did any actual work."

Of course she knew, all of the Senshi knew, it wasn't like the Shitennou had tried too hard to hide the fact that by 'natural science trip' they had actually meant the top twenty most notorious leisure cities of the Solar System. "Life is ending, I needed some bonding time with my brothers."

"I know that, but you got to have your fun, now I get to have mine." With her comment his hand slipped under her shirt and travelled up the smooth expanse of her back. He pushed on the space between her shoulder blades so that he could access her neck with his lips.

"By subjecting me to manual labour?" he asked.

"Drama queen," she said as her fingers wound their way into his curly, chocolate hair. She tugged him away so he could make eye contact with her. "Night stand first, sex after."

He ginned slyly. "Sex now, then we'll see about the DIY." His free hand dipped under her waistband and elicited a soft, involuntary moan from her.

"Fine, sex now, but you're fixing the puriphore and the slight wobble of the breakfast table."

He kissed her before she could add anything else to the list.

* * *

She couldn't help the light laugh which escaped as she watched Nephrite and all of his naked parts jiggle as he tried to force the e-shelf into place. "Satisfied now?" he asked when he heard a loud click.

She stretched in the bed and patted the space next to her, inviting him under the sheets. "Extremely."

He sat on top of them with his back resting against the headboard, his body too warm to be comfortable under the covers. She sat up as well once he put his arm around her shoulders, bringing her closer. They remained in companionable silence for some time but as the sun blazed on, too large and too close now to dip below the horizon, Nephrite had a sudden urge to ask Makoto something. "When you said that you liked to watch me fix things, that it reminded you of before…" He left the rest of the question unsaid, knowing that she would understand what he was asking.

She looked up at him. "I don't have a lot of memories of our past, the establishment of CT was so very long ago, but there are a few things that stand out."

"Like what?"

She smiled, more than willing to indulge in a walk down very faded memories. "Like the first birthday party we ever had for Ami… I don't know what that one stuck, but it did. I remember a few things about our wedding day, what you wore to Endymion's coronation, that time we had sex in the rain-"

He grinned. "There were a few of those. Hundreds, actually," he paused as he thought, "more like thousands, really."

"I meant the first time."

"Ah, yes," he kissed the top of her head at the memory, "I remember that one too." He stopped suddenly and did a quick calculation in his head. The grin from before morphed into an altogether different beast. To call it a smile would have been a heavy understatement. The glee that was pouring out from him was like radiation from the Sun, it was so strong it was almost tangible.

"What?" Makoto asked, suspicious.

He said nothing, his smile still plastered on his face, eyes mischievous.

"What?" she asked again, eager to know what he was thinking.

"Do you realise," he said, unable to hold it in any longer, "that we have had sex-" she rolled her eyes and reached for her pillow so she could hit him with it, knowing exactly where he was heading. "-literally millions of times. _Millions_." He started chuckling but was cut off as the incoming pillow caught him straight in the face. It did little to deter his inflating ego. "I am a sex king!" he said excitedly, pulling the pillow away. "And you are my sex queen!"

She smirked. It seemed that time had proven that there was no cure for immaturity.

"There should really have been some award for this, with a ceremony or something." He took her hand and shook it, his face suddenly very serious. "Congratulations, Makoto, Senshi of Jupiter. You've blown your husband's…" he paused deliberately, teasing her, "…_mind_ millions of times. Very well done, very, very well done indeed. Here is an impressively heavy medal which says you are the best and hottest wife the world has ever known."

A burst of laughter escaped her lips, a mix of embarrassment and delight. "You're too kind." She sought his large hands and interweaved them with hers. "And here is your huge medal," she said, deciding that since it was her last night on Earth she could give in to silliness and juvenile innuendo, "for being the only man to have made me want him millions," she kissed him, "and millions," she said as she kissed him again, "of times." She stared at him, immobile, re-visiting every familiar detail of his face. "I love you, Nephrite."

He touched his forehead to hers. "I know." He sighed, eyes closed. "We've had a good run, haven't we? We've suffered a good deal, but there were some great high points too that were worth it."

She pulled away and traced her finger along his bearded jawline, enjoying the scratching sound it produced. "That's the advantage of extended life, all the terrible things of the past have melted away. I have nothing but my recent memories to draw on and by that point we'd already been together for so long time you had pretty much infused yourself into my soul." She shook her head, amazed. "Just think of all the time we've forgotten."

"We replaced them with new memories."

"Not always good," she said, looking pointedly at him.

"No, but they must have been better than those in very our first lives."

She removed her hand and frowned as she turned away, thinking. "I remember nothing of that time. Sometimes I wonder if the Silver Millennium even existed," she admitted.

"I have one memory," he said. "It's not much, there's no context to it and everything is obscure, but it's there."

Makoto looked surprised. This was something she did not know. In the past she may have been upset by his not having shared it with her, but now she treated it as an exceptional gem. An exciting and new wonder. "You've never mentioned it before," she said, eyes suddenly bright.

"For a long time I thought it was just a memory of a dream, or an image I'd seen flashed in the sky at some point. It was only recently, when Zoisite was telling me of his own hazy recollections that I understood its significance."

"Tell me about it."

He smiled indulgently. "You were there. We were in a field, camping for the night. Your head was resting in my lap and we were listening to Jadeite and Minako sing to a tune that Zoisite was playing on his flute. But then Minako stopped, insisting that Rei sing instead since she had the stronger voice."

Makoto tilted her head in contemplation, her lips softly upturned as she tried to imagine it for herself.

"It's a fleeting moment, but I remember everything about it… the way the firelight danced in Endymion's dark eyes, the look of peace on Kunzite's face, Ami's finger, lightly keeping pace with the beat and your hair… warm and soft, spilling itself all over my lap. It was perfect."

"It sounds it." She looked away and sighed softly, "I don't think we must have had many opportunities to be together like that during the Silver Millennium."

"I'm glad I don't remember more. Past pain is best forgotten, especially if it involved betraying those we loved so dearly."

He was right, of course, the Silver Millennium had ended in ruin, bloodshed and hatred. Prejudices must have run deep, anger and fear must have been the dominant forces of war. It was for the best that the lesson had remained but the experience had been forgotten. In that sense, time was truly a healer. But there were other memories that Makoto regretted losing. "I cannot recall a single moment from my childhood, my earliest memory was transforming into Sailor Jupiter and even then it skips to a foggy recollection of meeting the others, and then you." Makoto frowned slightly. "I must have felt so alone until I met Serenity."

"At least you had a childhood to forget. We just appeared, apparently; revived out of rocks."

"Do you remember that happening?"

"Going from ghost to fully-formed adult?" He shook his head in the negative. "I suspect it would have been unpleasant, possibly even a little creepy."

"You must have been so bored as a crystal."

"Mamoru once told me that he used to find me in odd places in his bedroom. He thought it was my way of trying to warn him of something but he could never interpret my messages."

A knowing glint appeared in her grass-green eyes. "Do you really believe that?"

"No, more than likely I was doing it on purpose to tease and infuriate him, but it's cute that he still has his moments of ridiculous naivety."

She smiled suddenly as she was struck by an idea. "Let's make up memories."

"Make them up?"

"As if we were regular humans, no powers, ordinary life span, back in… what did we call it, the pre-CT calendar? The eighteen hundreds."

Nephrite snickered.

"What?"

"I'm pretty sure you're making yourself a hundred years older than you are."

"I am?" She looked down to her right and activated a research database. After a few moments she lifted her eyes to his again, green sparkling with amusement. "So I am. Well, it doesn't matter. Late nineteen hundreds. We were childhood sweethearts."

"Were we?"

"Yes," she said, brimming with excitement. "You were…hmm…"

"Two years your senior in school," Nephrite added, willing to play her game if it made her happy, "but we were next door neighbours, so we'd known each other our entire lives."

The apples of Makoto's cheeks rounded as she smiled. "I like that, except, we lived on neighbouring farms."

"The outdoors… country air; that would have been nice," Nephrite said, considering it. "Your family had an apple orchard and I used to sneak across and steal apples with friends."

"Ah, but one day you..." Makoto squinted one keen eye, "you were in a tree but accidentally knocked a beehive and you had to run away as fast as you could."

"Did I get stung?"

"No, because I saved you by pulling you into a haystack to hide."

"Very noble of you."

"It was," she said, smugly. "I was only six, nearly seven, and you were a nine year old boy who used to avoid me because you thought I was a girly baby."

"I see, was I terror of a child, then?"

"Oh you used to get into all sorts of mischief. You," she said, thinking it was highly amusing, "used to cow-tip."

"Well, your parents loved me. They thought I was a great kid."

She snorted at the idea. "Up until we started dating."

"At six and nine years old?" he asked, incredulous.

She laughed. "They kept trying to tell me that you were too old for me."

"When did we really start dating?"

She folded her arms and leaned back onto the headboard. "Your turn to decide."

He slid up with her. "When you were sixteen. By that point I had had a whole slew of young ladies to make my way through."

"I bet you did," she said, her lips twisted in playful sourness.

"Ah, but while I was the cleverest boy in school-"

"Even more so than Zoisite?" she said, interrupting.

He raised his eyebrows. "Zoisite is present in our little fictitious town?"

"Oh, everyone is," she answered, as if it were obvious.

"Fine, then I was even cleverer than Zoisite – he had a mechanical mind, you see-"

"I don't think they had cerebral enhancement technology pre-Crystal Tokyo."

He shook his head to correct her. "I meant that he was more suited to mechanical activities. Fixing, repairing, building…"

"Oh, so he worked in the town's hovmobile garage."

"Indeed, although I'm not sure they had hovmobiles pre-CT, either."

"So you performed better in school, but he was an excellent engineer?"

"Exactly." He stopped and wondered what had been the point of his conversation.

Makoto recognised the look easily. "You were saying that while you were the cleverest boy in school… and I interrupted."

Regaining his train of thought he smiled. "While I was the cleverest boy in school, it took me a very long time to understand my feelings for you and I had to go through all of those lovely young ladies to realise who my true soul mate was. Once I had established this fact, however, we wasted no time and got married."

She touched her head to his lightly. "Trust you to twist your philandering into something romantic."

They were quiet for a moment as they contemplated their alternate universe. "I would have liked to have lived on a farm, with parents and siblings. I would have had to have shared a room with, umm... two brothers…" Nephrite looked at Makoto, his eyes slightly wistful, "and I would have hated it. No privacy. But I would have grown up happy. We would have had a dog-"

"Did we ever have one?" Makoto asked, trying to remember if they had owned pets in reality.

Nephrite took in a deep breath. "We might have, definitely not in the most recent age, but perhaps during the Time of Awakening? I'm sure we-" he paused, wondering – not nearly for the first time – whether his memories had been real or skewered through visions. He gave up soon enough. "Well, someone had a dog…" he shook his head, "but that was about one hundred and eighty thousand years ago, so I have no real idea."

"I seem to remember there being…" Makoto's niggling feeling wouldn't leave. "Maybe it was Jadeite's or Serenity's… never mind. You had a dog," she said, going back to their little fantasy, "and, you definitely were one of those children with a hover board."

"I don't think they had hover boards in the twentieth century."

"Oh," Makoto looked disappointed for a second, but then waved it off, "it's our fantasy, we can have what we want in it."

"I want a Labrador."

"Done. What was his name?"

"Granite."

Makoto tried to place the name. "After the revolutionary mayor on Io?"

Nephrite's lip curled with distaste. "I'd completely forgotten about him."

"I never will," she said, rolling her eyes.

"I had been thinking about my e-ssistant."

"Oh," she nodded, "he did look a little like a Labrador."

"And we would have had nice long, innocent childhoods together. Fishing by the lake, playing with… I don't know, sticks and pine cones?"

Makoto clapped her hands together and tilted her head back as laughter spilled out of her. "Sticks and pine cones?" she asked, highly amused.

He smiled back at her. "I don't really know how they found life fun before the electronic age."

She cocked an eyebrow at him. "We had electricity in the nineteen hundreds," she said, grinning.

"Did we?"

Her surety wavered at his question. "I don't know…" her forehead crinkled, "did we? I think we did." When she saw he was looking away to access his e-neuromitter she waved it off. "Don't bother, I don't really care, to be honest. I'm more concerned about whether we had children."

He hugged her close. "Oh, loads. We started young, well, after our long childhood of eating pies and bird-watching and whatnot."

She laughed again. "How many is loads?"

"Six."

"Six?"

"At least. But the bare minimum would have to be enough to cover a Syncball team."

She rolled her eyes. "What if they don't want to play Syncball? What if they all hate Syncball with all of their hearts?"

He shook his head. "That would never happen."

"They'd be half me, you know."

"Well, my love of Syncball would override your completely incomprehensible lack of enthusiasm for the sport and they would all be fanatics."

"This really is a fantasy."

"I have names for them."

She had a sneaking suspicion that she could accurately guess what they would be. "Tell me."

"Kurosaki, Mgwane, Chiyo, Holden, Ogbele-"

"You had better not end that list with Cane. You are not naming our imaginary children after a stupid sports team."

"They were the greatest Syncball players the system has ever known!"

She folded her arms. "Why don't you just go and name yourself after one of them, and leave our poor children alone?"

He frowned. "What's wrong with 'Nephrite'?"

"If you called yourself Nephrite in our fantasy town, the townsfolk would think you were a..." unable to remember the word, she scanned her occular research database for the answer, "a hippie."

"I liked hippies... I think."

"It's your title, not your name," Makoto admitted. "It's so... impersonal."

Nephrite was taken by surprise at that. "But it was for convenience. You remember don't you? How we used to have to change our names every generation or so, to remove suspicion?"

Makoto quirked her lips in a smile. "I'm old, I'm not infirm."

"So, you don't like it?"

Makoto shook her head lightly. "It's not that, I just wish that you'd gone back to your original name when things had settled, like I did."

He nudged her. "It's a bit late to let me know now, just as we're about to perish." He looked away from her and stared into the luminescent red Sun. "Besides, do you even remember what my original name was? Because I don't."

"It must be listed _somewhere_." She activated the database again and searched.

"Not my first one. _That _I do remember. Zoisite deleted all of that personal information because they were our identities when Beryl recaptured us. He erased every trace of us when Endymion had found us again and we renewed our vow of servitude."

"Hmm..." Makoto murmured, admitting defeat. "Good point."

"I think my favourite was when I called myself Max, though. I had chosen it when I had been under Beryl's control, but I never got to use it... for obvious reasons." He turned to her for her input. "What do you think?"

She looked up and then shrugged. "I always liked your name Fernando. It even started with an 'N' when you used its short form."

Nephrite pulled a face of disapproval. "I hated that one. You've just confirmed to me that you have awful taste when it comes to names. We're sticking with my choices for the kids."

She snorted. "Well, if that's the case I get to name everybody else." She thought about it for a few moments. "Cory, for Kunzite and Soren for Zoisite. Edward for Jadeite, or Eddie for short."

"Cory? That's a terrible name for him!" Nephrite said, grinning. "He'd hate it."

"Exactly," Makoto said. "It would be hilarious."

"This is why I love you do much." He kissed the crown of her head.

"So," she said, getting back to their story, "we have six children, with dumb names-"

"And by 'dumb' you mean 'great'?"

"-and we lived on farms during our childhoods. What else?"

"We owned a… what were they called? A wayroom but in the old days."

"A diner?" Makoto only remembered the name because she knew of a wayroom which had been named after its ancient counterpart.

"Yes! That was it. Diners. We owned one. I would serve java and you would cook. Our kids would act as servers."

Makoto was struck with an idea. "Minako too!" she exclaimed. "She was a restless spirit who was eager to leave and seek fame and fortune."

"But she didn't find it because she's now working in our diner?" Nephrite questioned, not understanding.

"Sort of." She didn't like the idea of leaving her friend unhappy, even in their fake lives. Minako had suffered more than her fair share of anguish. "She found her true calling as a writer."

Considering that was the last thing Minako would ever take an interest in, Nephrite raised a dark eyebrow. "A writer, eh?"

"It's our fantasy. She turns out to be a world-famous author, but she serves for our diner to get out of the house and to listen to peoples' stories."

"Fair enough," he said, accepting her argument.

"And," Makoto was not done, "she marries her childhood sweetheart, the law enforcer Cory, who had let her go because he knew he could not keep her caged when she wanted to travel the world and see everything, but he welcomed her back wholeheartedly when she returned and they lived happily ever after."

"If only." Nephrite had been amused when she had used his humorous name choice for Kunzite, but the scenario sounded a little too familiar. The drama that had been the lives and relationships of the Head Shitennou and Senshi had been disastrous enough to cause scandal after scandal. "What about the others?"

Makoto understood her husband's desire to move on. Nephrite had been so steady and so supportive through most of Makoto's difficult times, he had not made the mistakes the others had, he had remained loyal in heart and spirit to her (if not always in body) but because of his strength, of his ability to move on and face his fears, because of his pragmatism and his wonderful compassion, he had also been thrown into the boiling pot of problems the others had stirred. They had forced him to act as confidant, they had used him as a prop for their personal wars, they had given him no choice but to choose sides; it had not been easy. "Well, Ami and Jadeite had been childhood sweethearts-"

He scoffed and moved his shoulder so her head rolled up. "Really?"

"You cannot deny there was something there between them. They certainly proved it."

"I have had enough of illicit affairs."

"Well then, let me finish," she said, settling her head back onto his shoulder.

He smiled. "My apologies. Continue, please. You were saying something about how every single couple in our town were childhood sweethearts…"

"Is there something wrong with that?"

The tip of his nose traced its way along her hairline. "No, I think it's cute."

She nudged him playfully and lifted her head to kiss him. "As I was saying," she said, "Jadeite and Ami were childhood sweethearts, but they moved away to different places. She came back to set up a little healer's business with Endymion, where she met Zoisite, and Jadeite returned with his pregnant wife."

"Pregnant wife, you say?" The very idea was odd. "Rei?"

"In my fantasy, I am not only a mother, but an aunty of many nieces and nephews, too."

"You had Serenity the Second for her unusually long childhood."

Makoto thought back fondly to when the young new queen had been known simply as Chibi-Usa. "Imagine how much more fun she would have had growing up with more children around her." If there had been any doubt, the memory of the lonely little pink-haired girl was enough to seal her decision. "They're all having kids. She needed cousins, as would our own children."

Nephrite rubbed his hand along her bicep, finding her sweetness even more endearing than he thought possible. "So, what do Rei and Jadeite do for a living, then?"

"Jadeite is an advocate and Rei is a teacher at Serenity's school."

"You really have this all figured out, don't you?"

"I've thought about it a lot."

He took in a deep breath at that. "I'm so sorry," he said, his eyes clouding with guilt.

She did not need to ask why. "You shouldn't be. It was not in your power to alter my destiny. And I am happy. Right here, right now, with you."

"I just wish I could have made it better."

She sat up straight and faced him, grabbing his head with her hands and forcing him to pay attention. "You did. I hope I did the same for you."

"More than you will ever know." His heart began to pound in his chest, a mixed bag of swelling love for the woman in front of him, and of fear – a warning. The end was approaching. "I love you, Makoto," he said, a desperate need for her to hear it springing up inside of him. "I love you, so very much." How had the end crept up on them so swiftly? Where had all of the time gone? It had never occurred to him that he might have been afraid.

She felt the tension too, but she didn't care, not in the way that she saw it was suddenly affecting him. Her life had been long and it had been worth it and she had been happy. "I know. I'm right here, and I'm never leaving." She leaned in and he met her halfway, kissing her with a fervour they hadn't shared with each other in a very long time.

The room began to rumble, above and below. The heat from the window seared with blinding intensity as the light blazed through - the fire of a vengeful, angry Sun.

The world cooked away, but neither of them noticed as they met oblivion.


End file.
